Growing up in Australia, Christmas was always in December, but the traditions felt imported. While the temperature soared, we clung to cold-climate rituals: roast dinners, Christmas puddings and snowflake decorations — the kind of festive imagery that made sense in Europe and North America, but not so much in a sunburnt country at the peak of summer.
It wasn’t until the 1990s that Australians started to lean into a more authentic homegrown version of the holiday: seafood lunches, backyard barbecues, cold drinks and beach cricket. Before that cultural shift, though, came a clever seasonal workaround: Christmas in July. It gave people the chance to enjoy winter fare when it actually was winter. More importantly, it created a new cultural moment.
That same psychology — a sense of occasion and the joy of limited-time moments — is at the core of what makes Amazon’s Prime Day work so well.
Amazon’s Prime Day turned a sale into a season
With Prime Day, Amazon didn’t just create a shopping event, it built a behavior. Prime Day now marks a moment on the retail calendar when even competitors lean in with their own events: Walmart Deals, Target Circle Week, Best Buy’s Black Friday in July. These are not passive summer markdowns. They are coordinated campaigns, timed for maximum impact, designed to make the consumer act now, not later.
They borrow from the fast-food world’s limited-time offers (LTOs), which have long driven urgency through menu scarcity and countdown windows. Retailers are simply applying that same logic to promotions: if a deal only lasts 48 hours, hesitation becomes a liability. The excitement comes from the pressure.
The magic, however, lies in the marketing machinery behind the moment.
The engine behind the curtain: affiliate marketing
Amazon doesn’t rely on buzz to happen organically. It manufactures momentum by mobilizing its affiliate network well in advance. Amazon Associates as affiliate partners are called, receive confidential previews, access to creative assets and more in the lead-up to the event. When Prime Day begins, thousands of publishers, from commerce editors to niche bloggers, are primed to promote with precision and scale. This isn’t just “early access.” It’s synchronized strategic amplification. And that muscle is what turns Prime Day into a cultural moment rather than a transactional blip.
Many marketers see affiliate marketing as an afterthought, but rarely the centerpiece of a campaign. That thinking misses the point.
Affiliate marketing as a distribution engine
Done right, affiliate marketing is a strategic distribution engine. It channels content through trusted sources, taps into niche audiences and delivers measurable impact across the funnel. During Prime Day, affiliate coverage floods social channels and search results with Prime Day roundups, product reviews and deal hubs. These pages are optimized for discovery, and often prepared weeks in advance, creating an organic moat for Amazon. Other retailers may synchronize their own events to Prime Day, but without a coordinated approach to affiliate marketing, they are missing a key ingredient.
The real lesson of Amazon’s Prime Day: moments move people
Prime Day is more than an e-commerce spike. It’s a reminder that moments move people. Scarcity still works. Timelines still matter. And retail, online or offline, can still be thrilling when it’s built around something that feels like it won’t come again.
But it’s also a reminder that affiliate marketing deserves high consideration in any retailer’s marketing mix, if you truly want to capture excitement, audiences and customers.
Want to learn more and continue the conversation about affiliate marketing? Rise can help.
