“Alexa, which audience should I target today?”
While billboards and TV commercials had long been the norm for advertising, the 21st century has seen a metamorphosis. With the catching up of the Internet, the rule of the Google, and paid marketing on the forefront, advertising is a wholly different thing now... and the present decade has given it a new face altogether. With all that is going in with AI (artificial intelligence) and bots, voice/audio is certainly the brand-new face of advertising.
Apple has Siri, Amazon has Alexa, Google has Google Assistant, and a lot of people are interested in what they have to offer. This is where the future of advertising is headed – capturing market through audio. Now, you just don’t need to be there on Google or Bing, you need to be where Siri and Alexa can find you. They can find you whatever you need. Per the findings of the Pew Research (2015), 64% Americans use smart phones. And, as smart phone technology is evolving, it is the voice search that is gaining ground, much more than any other feature.
How Voice is the Present and the Future
So the best that any entrepreneur could have done is aim at voice search to sell in the best possible manner. You can get yourself found by Siri as much as you need to be found by Google. When iPhone users ask Siri for “Starbucks near me” Siri is likely to pick it from the local listing and find the Starbucks closest to the user’s location.
Alexa has taken it a step further, and introduced Alexa Skills with Amazon Echo. It enables Echo users to hear Alexa skills (ads) like new updates and music streaming. It is done through Sponsored Messages, a new ad platform on Alexa. It lets the third party developers create skills or ads (6 to 15 seconds long) for this voice assistant.
Podcasts are not far behind either. If we believe the Podcasting Audit Study by Bridge Ratings, by the year 2020, advertisers are most likely to spend as much as $500 million on podcast ads. People listen to the podcasts because they like the speakers and that keeps them engaged. Listeners, in this case, stay much more engaged than by any other mode of advertising.
Voice search and advertising seems to be taking the course of success at a pretty fast pace. Odds are that it may become the very standard of advertising.
