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Advertising in voice interfaces
Types of advertising in Alexa, Google Assistant or any voice interface
You can read this article in Spanish: Publicidad en interfaces de voz.
Advertising and its different formats have been the most lucrative business model in the content industry from its very beginning. Something like a lesser evil for many users open to “pay” the price for accessing content without directly spending money on it.
Alexa, Google, Siri, Bixby, or any other player in the voice technology world, are looking for alternatives to building a sustainable business model away from advertising. Especially when advertising is sometimes against their own policies. In late 2018 Alexa released In-Skill Purchase as an alternative for which you can read this article on how to have the best selling strategy with ISP.
Despite the efforts of moving away from advertising many companies and creators and still wondering how to make the advertising business work in a voice interface.
In this post, I will be sharing my ideas about advertising in Alexa, Google, or any other VUI, and how to do it right from a user experience perspective.
Why is advertising in Alexa or Google uncommon?
Amazon Alexa, Google, or Sir are trying to keep users safe from suffering a similar experience to the one in most web pages: banners, pop-ups, and different items blinking in our screen trying to make us click.
In 2017 VoiceLabs tried to create the first Advertising company for Alexa, but the policy updates in Amazon and Google forced them to suspend their ad network.
If we take into account how voice interactions work, policies against advertising seem to have even more sense. Micro-interactions are king and queen in voice interfaces, where most users only make simple requests and one or two-steps interactions (“Alexa what time is now?”). The idea of mixing those micro-moments with advertising doesn’t seem to have a good fit.
Imagine that Google or Alexa could become similar to the following:
User: Alexa, what’s the weather now?
