Amazon rows back on New York Nazi ads

It must have seemed like a good idea to somebody.

Amazon has come under fire after plastering Nazi-type imagery over a subway train in New York, a city with the largest Jewish population outside Tel Aviv.

It was the second mis-step in the marketing for The Man in the High Castle, Amazon’s big-budget drama, which imagines the world if the Axis powers won the second world war.

A fortnight ago the Guardian newspaper had to pulp 300,000 copies of its listing magazine the Guide, after senior editors realised too late that a cover image about the show, headlined “The Reich Stuff”, could be offensive.

The badly received publicity moves are a lesson to marketers and magazine designers. But they also illustrate the intense battle for audience eyeballs in the television industry: with streaming companies - and traditional broadcasters - looking for riskier programming ideas and marketing them more aggressively.

Distinctive

"You have to do more and be more distinctive to stand out," says Dan Brooke, marketing director at Channel 4. In the US, streaming service Hulu has pledged to boost spending by 70 per cent this year to promote its own original shows, such as The Mindy Project.

Amazon and Netflix, which are seeking to define their creative ambition, start at a disadvantage because they do not have traditional TV channels.

By contrast, the BBC does little promotion for its programming in the UK - relying instead on cross-promotion from its various outlets, which include the country’s most popular TV channel, radio station and news website.

“A good old, linear schedule” allows broadcasters to rely on a certain inbuilt audience, says Tim Westcott, an analyst at IHS. Unlike Netflix, Amazon at least has a retail website, where A Man in the High Castle has been extensively featured, he adds.

Work harder

Even those companies with existing TV channels are having to work harder to establish their reputation for drama. UK pay-TV broadcaster Sky promoted Fortitude, a £25 million Arctic thriller that was its most expensive drama to date, by placing an 8ft model of a polar bear at various London landmarks.

Channel 4's Humans, a drama about artificial intelligence, was preceded by an extended hoax - including an eBay page and a store on London's Regent Street that both purported to sell robots.

“Fifteen years ago people would just turn up [to watch shows],” says Mr Brooke. “Now you have to go out and reach them more.”

But the shift to more innovative marketing, which cannot be turned off like a TV or YouTube advert, requires a particular duty of care, says Tim Duffy, UK chair of M&C Saatchi, the advertising agency. "There was a duty on [Amazon] to make clear the premise" of the Nazi imagery.

Amazon is removing its campaign from the New York subway, but the publicity is unlikely to have been entirely unwelcome. Next year it launches Jeremy Clarkson’s new motoring show; the boundaries of taste may soon be pushed again.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2015