Amazon pulled its fourth-quarter advertisements from Bloomberg’s website, a move some within the media giant think is retribution for Bloomberg’s controversial storyalleging that Chinese spies hacked into the online retailer’s servers.
According to a source in a position to know, Amazon’s digital media buyer, Initiative, informed Bloomberg’s sales staff on Oct. 16 that it would cancel its ad buys for the fourth quarter due to budget cuts. Internally, the source said, the staff received that decision, made only eight days after a previous communication with Initiative confirming that the ads would run, as a direct response to Amazon’s displeasure over the Oct. 4 story. (Amazon announced Thursday that its marketing expenses for Q3 2018 were $3.3 billion, up more than $800 million from the year before.)