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Google Wants To Create Promotions That Aren't Ads For Its Voice-Controlled Assistant (businessinsider.in)
Earlier this month, some Google Home users noticed what appeared to be audio ads for Disney's "Beauty and the Beast" movie. After some intense backlash, the company released a statement claiming that the ad was not an ad, but that it was simply "timely content" that Disney didn't pay for. Google's UK director of agencies, Matt Bush, has since spoken out about the company's plans with advertising via the voice-controlled Assistant. Business Insider reports: Bush explained Google isn't looking to offer brand integrations in voice for the time being, since it didn't have enough data to come up with an ad product that adds value for consumers. "We want businesses to have a phenomenal mobile experience and then building on that have a phenomenal voice experience," Bush told Business Insider at Advertising Week Europe. "That might not be, in the early instances, anything that has to do with commercials at all. It might just be something something that adds value to the consumer without needing to be commercialized." Bush explained that the consumer experience with voice is very different from that of text search because the use cases for voice navigation differ depending on the device the function is used on and the context the user finds themselves in. "We don't want to start putting in commercial opportunities that we think users don't want to interact with," Bush said "We don't want anything to come in-between the user and their access to the information they're actually looking for. If a brand can add value in that space, fantastic." Bush cited mobile search ads as successful executions of using context and personal user insights, but voice promotions are unlikely to take the same form. "It's unlikely to be what you see from search as it currently stands, where you might have three or four ads as the top results of a search," he said.
"We don't want to start putting in commercial opportunities that we think users don't want to interact with,"
You know what people call "commercial opportunities that users do want to interact with"? They call them ads.
And I have no problem with ads like this in the proper context "Alexa, I need toilet paper." "Ok, you can buy the same brand you bought the last time, but Charmin is on sale today and is $2.37 less expensive"
That's the kind of ad I'm happy to have, but I don't want to hear "Today's weather is sunny and 63 degrees. Today is clean-your-butt day and we have Charmin on sale!"