December 10, 2007 at 6:16 am | In Uncategorized | 9 Comments
Tags: Amazonm Rabbit, Anal Douche, Fresh WHole, Hoax, Scam, Viral, Viral marketing
Customers who bought a Fresh Whole Rabbit at Amazon also bought anal douches and micro g-strings. How to explain this curious phenomenon?
- Only one person has so far bought a rabbit from Amazon and coincidentally ordered an anal douche with this delivery. If only one person is your statistical base, your results must of course be distorted (and the 13 comments on the page don’t sound like they come from people who really ordered the rabbit).
- People are hacking/faking their purchases to achieve funny product recommendations.
- Amazon is actively faking weird product recommendations which their marketing staff distribute among friends and bloggers to drive viral traffic to their site – meaning that I am now exactly doing what they wanted to achieve.
I kind of have the feeling that the latter applies.
I would go with a different theory: the most popular kind of rabbit you can buy from amazon is the Rabbit Vibrator (if a woman says: “I bought a rabbit,” the process of signification at least in US culture at this point tends to envoke the vibrator). Hence, the link between rabbit and other sex toys/lingerie probably results from a glitch in the distinction process between kinds of rabbits (i.e. the inability to separate animal from sex toy).
Comment by cerebraljetsam — December 10, 2007 #
Oooh! That’s shedding a truly different light on the story. Do you mean to suggest that those customers accidentally bought a fresh rabbit instead of their sex toy?
It’s also possible that Amazon includes page views (i.e. not only actual purchases) in its ranking.
Comment by anaj — December 10, 2007 #
I have a dim recollection of seeing a sex in the city episode (a friend was into it) with a rabbit vibrator. Is this where the rabbit took off?
And here it is:
http://www.omazingplatinumrabbit.com/index.php?campaign=g
Comment by skunkcabbage — December 11, 2007 #
When opening links in the office, one should make sure loudspeakers are turned off.
Comment by anaj — December 11, 2007 #
Oh, sorry!!!
Comment by skunkcabbage — December 11, 2007 #
No worries, my stupidity! at this hour of the day, anything must be allowed anyway. So SATC coined the term for a vibrator?
I admit I thoroughly enjoyed the show when I first saw it – meanwhile I have come to think of it as a glossy encouragement to consume lovers like shoes.
Comment by anaj — December 11, 2007 #
That’s very much what I take to be the ethos of the show. And didn’t Sarah Jessica Parker promptly launch a perfume line following its demise?
Comment by skunkcabbage — December 11, 2007 #
A perfume line, and a clothing line as well, if I do remember correctly.
I was once invited to an ‘All girls SATC evening’ where the boyfriend of the lady who had invited us had been given the order to serve us cosmos (a particularly non-delicious cocktail that seems to be drunken a lot in SATC) all night. And he did.
Shortly before we left, he revealed to us that he had had us filmed the whole evening: glued to the screen, drinking cosmos.
A very revelatory mocking of the subject position women acquire when watching SATC, and a painful pointer to the fact how anti-emancipatory this is (although he genuinely meant to mock us, which didn’t make the encounter more agreeable).
Comment by anaj — December 11, 2007 #
Sounds like a fairly awful evening, and mean-spirited on the boyfriend’s part. Perhaps the order to serve caused him to feel a need to re-assert his “manhood/power/whatever”.
Probably, were one to view the subject position he acquires watching various things, his mockery might ring a bit hollow. The kind of insecurity that masks itself by belittling others (which, arguably, I’m performing right now) is very boring.
This is not to suggest that SATC doesn’t create a certain kind of subject, but rather to suggest that it is one instance of the vast ideological universe that we all inhabit.
Good to be critical of it. That critique is stronger when it’s collaborative.
Comment by skunkcabbage — December 11, 2007 #