In our latest installment of our Why You Should Never Let Amazon Produce Your Enhanced Content series, we examine this three-minute marketing video in which an Amazon representative attempts to sell us on the benefits of Amazon’s options for enhanced content.
Let’s freeze a couple of frames in this video to better understand how it proves, without a doubt, that you don’t want Amazon to ever produce enhanced content for your products.
Where do I start? First of all, is this A+ page selling dogs, or worse yet, dog paws?
Amazon rules require that product images are of the product. The page in this frame would get immediately rejected by the A+ team because it does not show images of the product. A quick glance creates customer confusion, not exactly what a vendor wants their product content to do.
As for the text… where do I stop?
The text is difficult to read on YouTube, but here are some highlights to consider:
- “An essential tool for homes with pets, the all natural dog bone is great for all your pet needs.”
A dog bone is a “tool” and it’s really “great for all your pet needs”? Will it walk and wash your pet too?
- “They are also shown in improving the dog’s dental health by giving the dog a chance to exercise gums and scrape teeth.”
Did a native-English-speaking marketing person really approve this sentence?
- “Do you want something that you know only has natural ingredients.”
This question-cum-declarative sentence is playing fast and loose with the all-natural speech and grammar patterns of humans, and it’s also the last sentence of the description. I guess it ends in a period instead of a question mark because there’s really no answer.
And don’t fret about the wealth of minor grammatical errors in this two-section description. Consumers don’t need good grammar, AKA “accurate information,” to make a buying decision, so vendors certainly don’t need a copyeditor’s time to be included in this service.
As for the section headers, usually considered the best avenue for conveying at-a-glance user-benefit product information, here’s what the A+ example shows:
- From Our Home, to Yours
Again, I ask myself, are they selling dogs?
- All Natural for your Dog
And again I wonder, what’s the value of a copyeditor?
Let’s look at another frame:
Here we get to the heart of the matter: Amazon’s new self-service template option in Vendor Central. Notice the prices: For a mere $500, you can purchase space on your product’s page that will house the content you create. That’s right: $500 to describe your product, so consumers know what they are buying. Fair enough, a slotting fee. And for $2,000, you can let Amazon produce the same kind of awesome A+ content you’ve just seen in this video.
Over the next 20 seconds of the video, we are shown how to purchase this service from Amazon. The video says nothing about the turnaround time to build the pages, the rounds of content revisions you won’t get, or the control you won’t have over your messaging. But it does show you how easy it is to submit your order and pay Amazon.
And let’s remember this video is Amazon’s own example of product content for one of their newest products (the self-service template). You’d think they might have invested more energy in the content. Shown the actor the script a few times prior to filming so he knew what he was supposed to say, developed product content that actually demonstrated the features of good content called out in the video, trained the dog to act out the metaphor of looking lost instead of looking like she was just following treats…
All kidding aside, if this video is representative of the importance Amazon places on content production, do you want them to have a say over your content?
