Subversive Advertisement Revision - Amazon Prime & Packaging Waste

Amazon Prime offers members free two-day, one-day, or even same-day shipping, without a minimum purchase amount. While this on-demand service is extremely convenient for consumers, it has led to an immense amount of packaging waste that is bad for the environment. Online shoppers typically try to buy items in bulk to save money on shipping, however with Amazon Prime, there are no financial repercussions to ordering multiple items separately because shipping is free no matter what. This causes shoppers to buy more frequently than they should, making orders whenever they think of buying something instead of combining all the items they need into one order and choosing a more sustainable delivery option.

I took inspiration from Amazon Prime advertisements, which typically feature a very minimal design, with a catchy slogan emphasizing the free shipping features. Some advertisements also include clean images of the easily recognizable brown Amazon box, but typically only one or two in the ad (as seen below).

I decided to use the image of the brown box and blue/white packaging to make a statement, by editing many packages together, as if they were piled together. I used the same typeface that Amazon uses to be consistent with their visual design, and borrowed the slogan from one of the ads, with a few tweaks to subversively show the negative side effect of Amazon Prime’s free shipping.

Based on the feedback from class discussion, I decided to add more images of Amazon boxes and packages that were opened, so that the pile of packages looked much more like a pile of trash, to emphasize the wastefulness caused by Amazon Prime’s services. I chose to keep the “delivered in millions of ways” messaging that people liked and felt subversively conveyed the idea of immense packaging waste without diverging too much from Amazon’s typical messaging.