- Amazon has expanded his ‘Shop the Show’ feature to Prime Video Shows
- It allows you to see and buy products from the movie or show that you are watching
- But will this mean more product placement in Prime Video Originals?
Amazon has brought his “Shop the Show” program into its American app, making it easy for you to find products related to specific movies and shows – and that’s just increased the number of shopping shows to over 1,300.
The idea is simple enough: let’s say you see The boys And will buy some binders. Simply open the Amazon app, search for the “Shop Show” and you can then find an organized collection of products related to the HIT show.
I don’t want to pretend that I’m immune to wanting the weird Merch, but I worry what it means for future prime video originals. Because I think the temptation to fill them with sales opportunities in the form of increasingly anesthetic product placement will be impossible for Amazon to resist.
Why am I worried about shopping the show
I’m worried about combining shows and selling because every time a streamer tries to make more money from its users, which is of course what the store is designed to do, make the service worse.
For example, after sitting through the pre-show ads last night on Disney+, my episode of Andor was interrupted by another ad after just four minutes. And on Prime Video My Bosch Legacy See views suffered in the hands of automated ad breaks that didn’t care if they were in the middle of the stage or broken tension. I tried to watch a concert video on YouTube the second night and the first ads didn’t even wait for the first song to end.
What worries me about the Shop Show is that this particular form of revenue arrangement could further destroy programs, with ‘Amazon the Shop’ pushing more and more product location to ‘Amazon the Streamer’.
For streamers, product placement is even better than ads. You can’t skip it and you can’t pay to get rid of it. And you can put it in existing shows that didn’t before: As Advertising Publication Drum Reports, Amazon has experimented with virtual product location – added products to existing content – in several ways.
Of course, product placement is nothing new. And I am writing on a site that generates some of its revenue from linking to online dealers. But I do not work for these retailers, and I do not write with them in mind – just like in TV, where the show’s producer is usually not the retailer of the products placed on the screen. This distance between the craft and the trade usually limits how obvious product placement can be.
With Amazon and Prime Video, the show maker and store are the same company. Different departments, determined, but think of the synergy.
I hope that I am wrong and that Amazon does not let sales affect what is on screen. I am all to make it easier to find the books Bosch is based on, or the video games that led to Fallout show. But when I look at my Amazon search results and remember as they used to show me what I would rather than what Amazon wants to show me, I can’t say I’m very optimistic.
