Top 5 Marketing, Advertising and Social Media Happenings This Week

Amazon Prime Day Climbs Back from a Slow Start: Amazon’s 36-hour Prime Day promotion happens once a year on the company’s birthday and allows all Prime members access to hundreds of deals. This would have been fine and dandy, had Amazon been fully prepared. The site was down for many users for a large chunk of the day Monday, prompting some hilarious tweets from several dedicated Primers and even a #PrimeDayFail hashtag.

Never fear, said Jeff Bezos (probably) – this was the company’s biggest revenue generator to-date, topping of at an estimated $3.4 billion in sales, according to Bloomberg. Hats off to you guys, and thanks for the discounted dog treats.

Sports! World Cup 2018: The World Cup was one for the books this year. There were lots of underdogs beating out big-time teams, specifically Croatia who has never been in a World Cup final game and, though they lost, played with major gusto.

More than the whole winning thing, for us tech/digital nerds, the numbers reported by FIFA regarding interactions, videos watched and engagements built across platforms was at an all-time high. For example, record-breaking interest from fans online resulted in over 7.5 billion engagements across FIFA digital platforms during the Cup, according to FIFA.com.

Facebook to Up Fake News Policies: This isn’t major news, as Facebook already bans content that directly calls for violence. The social media giant is taking it a step further by banning content that directly calls for physical harm, according to CNET.

To do this, they’re looking to partner up with local organizations to help them decipher whether or not something should be taken as fake news. They’ve done this a few times already, removing content that alleged Muslims are poisoning food that’s given and sold to Buddhists, CNET reports.

Netflix, Hulu, Prime Video…Walmart?: The grocery giant has been making headlines lately by offering grocery delivery, personal shopping and their TV ads promoting their free 2-day delivery is encroaching on the timely delivery that Amazon Prime users are used to seeing. Netlifx, Hulu and Prime Video all vary in terms of cost, none ranging over $15 per month but sources say that if Walmart can pull this off, theirs will likely be cheaper than all three of these. So, yes, it’ll be a big contender.

Amazon: we’re doing it all, we even have a streaming service!
Walmart: hold my beer…

Blockbuster, Like Toys R’ Us, is Headed Out: I will never forget waiting for my dad to come home from work, so he could take my three siblings and I to Blockbuster. I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels this way and I feel a sense of nostalgia in knowing that the last two of three blockbuster stores left in the U.S. have officially closed. The remaining store in Bend, OR, stands determined, defending itself against the streaming giants we have become accustomed to using.

Blockbuster closed its last few hundred corporate-owned stores back in 2013, the New York Times reports. What a sad day for all of us ‘90s kids.