Resisting Black Friday advertising hype

Amazon has resumed its annual advertising blitz as part of Black Friday, now extended to ‘Black Friday week'. In 2023, Amazon overtook Sky and McDonald’s to become the highest spending company on advertising in the UK, blowing £30 million in outdoor ad and £68 million in TV campaigns alone. 

Behind the marketing bombardment is a company that has become a behemoth of our times. Gone are the days when Amazon were simply putting much-loved independent book shops out of business.  The Seattle-based corporation has now grown to cover online shopping, delivery, entertainment, logistics, groceries and web cloud computing services. 

Boycotting Amazon remains worthwhile as an awareness-raising exercise - but as the October outage of the company’s web servers, which directly affected 2,000 companies including Signal Messenger and HMRC, many of us are now tied to the company whether we like it or not.

Pledges

Amazon’s profits are built upon the squeezed pay and conditions of its workers and its world-beating ability to avoid its fair share of taxes.  Additionally, the huge electricity and water requirements to power and cool down of its data centres is now a source of increasing alarm. 

Eliza Pan, from Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, told The Ecologist: “New data centres are directly causing utilities to build new gas plants and delay coal plants’ retirements, and that locks us into using dirty energy for decades at a minimum.”

A recent Source Material investigation found that Amazon now operates 924 data centres in 50 countries, although the company has never confirmed this publicly.

Amazon has pledged to become carbon neutral by 2040, but in 2023 it was removed from the UN-backed Science Based Target Initiative’s certified list after the organisation said Amazon failed to set credible emissions targets. 

While tech companies typically profess a love for renewable energy, many sites in the US are increasingly turning to gas-fired power stations despite their climate pledges. 

Fueled

In England, five large data centre projects have made formal enquiries to National Gas about direct connections to the gas grid to build their own on-site gas electricity plants. 

Amazon has been accused of deliberately concealing their true water usage across their different platforms in leaked company memos from 2022. With new data centres planned in water-stressed areas in Buckinghamshire, Amazon responded last month with plans for four new water replenishment plants in the US, Mexico and England. 

These diverse impacts have sparked an impressive feat of intersectional organising between trade unionists, tax justice, environmentalists and privacy campaigners as part of the Make Amazon Pay coalition.  

‘Subvertising’ activists from Brandalism and Everyone Hates Elon, responding to the advertising bombardment that drives Black Friday, took more than 100 billboard, bus stop and London Underground advertising sites earlier this month. 

One guerilla billboard artwork in London compared the Big Tech CEOs to ‘parasites’ in a parody NHS advert to be removed with a wealth tax, whilst others linked the fires of the Amazon rainforest with Amazon’s fossil fueled powered data centres.

Unionise

These subvertising actions feature as part of two weeks of European-wide protests against the outdoor advertising industry that promotes the Black Friday craze.

The 'ZAP Games' — french for Zone Anti-Publicité / Anti-Ad Zone — calls for affinity groups to “re-purpose” commercial ad spaces in creative and humorous ways - with action categories including ‘most family friendly’, ‘sculpture’ and ‘digital screens’.

Meanwhile, strikes, walkouts and protests are again planned for the Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekend at Amazon sites in 30 countries including the UK, Denmark, Spain, Greece, Poland, Luxembourg, Australia, Indonesia, Taiwan, Nepal, Palestine, Brazil, Colombia, and South Africa. 

These walkouts and strikes are all the more courageous given that Amazon workers are amongst the most monitored in the world with their right to unionise aggressively suppressed and reprisals against key organisers well documented. 

Techno-authoritarian

“We do not believe unions are in the best interest of our customers, our shareholders or most importantly our associates,” explained one video for Amazon staff.   

Amazon’s surveillance technologies are now increasingly woven into the apparatus of repression around the world. The company’s technologies are provided to police and military services including ICE and the Pentagon in the US. 

Israeli military officials have credited Google and Amazon’s ‘Project Nimbus’ cloud services with enhancing their ability to track and kill targets. Significantly more than 67,000 Palestinians, mostly civilian and a high proportion children, have been killed since October 2023.

The growing alliance between Big Tech and the far right represents a disturbing techno-authoritarian direction of travel. 

Fooled

Amazon, Google, Meta and AI-chip maker Envidia all contributed $1 million dollars each to Trump’s 2025 inauguration fund - and the rush to dominate the energy-hungry AI sector means they will struggle to tout any climate meaningful climate credentials at the same time. 

The Make Amazon Pay coalition has the muscular organising potential to confront this dystopia and force a reset of the labour, tax and environmental regulations that current governments are either actively dismantling or cowardly avoiding. 

The advertising industry will attempt to lure us onto Amazon’s platform again this Black Friday - and the company’s ‘dark patterns’ web design will make it hard to get off. For all the hype, a 2025 Which? report found that most deals are cheaper or the same price at other times of the year.

“Don’t be fooled by clever marketing,” the consumer watchdog warns.  Indeed.

This Author

Robbie Gillett is the co-founder of Adfree Cities - a network of city groups aiming to reduce the harms of corporate outdoor advertising, and a member of the Make Amazon Pay coalition.