Amazon FAIL?

I usually don’t mind Amazon’s “other people who have bought what you bought” e-mails as I buy a lot of stuff from them, in fact I rarely go anywhere else just because I trust Amazon and have already paid for their Prime service. The advertising system works by matching patterns between something you’ve bought and something that other people who have also bought that item have bought. For instance, it might notice that you’ve bought a new printer. It will know on average that people who bought that same printer have also bought ink and paper. Therefore it will offer to sell you the same ink and paper. There isn’t much artificial intelligence behind it – more just basic pattern matching. However, sometimes it fails spectacularly.

It began simply enough when I received the following e-mail:

It starts:

We’ve noticed that customers who have purchased or rated Justice League Unlimited – Season One (DC Comics Classic Collection) or other films in the Cartoon Network > General AAS category…

“Fine,” I think, “I have indeed bought JLU Season One from them”. So I read on.

…have also purchased CandyGirl Video: Sugar Rush.

At which point alarm bells should have been ringing. However, my brain wasn’t quite expecting to associate an adult entertainment video with Justice League Unlimited so I was left trying to remember if CandyGirl is some sort of The Life and Times of Juniper Lee Cartoon Network show or if its some part of the DC Comics’s MINX line I haven’t heard of. I’ll save you the details of what Candy Girl: Sugar Rush video actually is (you can Google them as well as anybody else), but its the automated computer logic that equates purchasing Justice League Unlimited to purchasing an adult film that I find interesting.

I blogged about JLU’s audience demographic a few years ago and its no secret that JLU skewed towards an older demographic than The Batman or Brave and the Bold. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that Amazon’s computer brain makes the association. But I’m still undecided whether this is an epic fail on Amazon’s part or a deeply damning psychological assessment of adults who still watch cartoons.