The best Cyber Monday deals according to Alexa: any Amazon-owned brand

Cyber Monday was the biggest shopping day in Amazon's history. Turns out it was also a day for Amazon to promote its own brands over all others. On Monday, asking an Amazon Echo for the "best Cyber Monday deals" returned five straight responses from smart assistant Alexa that promoted products owned by Amazon: Amazon acquired Blink, a maker of security cameras, in 2017; it purchased Ring, the maker of video doorbells, in 2018. An Amazon spokesperson told Recode that after those first five deals, Amazon did promote items made by other companies, and that Alexa-enabled non-Echo devices returned deals in their first five responses that included non-Amazon-owned items. But the initial Alexa responses are just another sign of Amazon's aggressiveness in promoting its own brands, whether they are gadgets like the Echo family of smart speaker products and Ring doorbells or apparel lines like Goodthreads.