Tag Archive for: legal

Experiential marketing will reach the home

AdWeek’s Sarah Priestman offers this assessment of experiential marketing:

The experience economy is booming, brands are seeking real-world impact, the creative industries are putting dollars behind new capabilities—really, what more do we need to do but let the good times roll?

Priestman goes on to emphasize the experimental and artistic qualities of experiential marketing, urging marketers not to think of this new style as a channel. “For lack of a better definition,” she writes, “experiential is the art of ‘expressing a brand’s purpose and proposition through a form of real-world consumer interaction.'”

Several trends are converging that raise the experiential challenge to the level of a revolution: Mass marketing is dying, turning to highly segmented experience that increases interaction and data gathering that produce better product design, improved inventory management, and a “pull” relationship with customers; On-demand business is driving experience down to Main Street and the consumer’s home; Communication technology is fragmenting as new channels open, each supporting a different experiential engagement.

Priestman rightly focuses on the roles of the brand strategist and producers in current experiential work, but this is a prelude to the delivery of experience in the home. Where experiential marketing today tends to happen at parties and events, such as a Bonnaroo or extreme sports event and brand events presented in urban cores, the future of marketing is personal and in-home. We need an interface at the local level to support this potential form of customer intimacy, and it is made of people. ###

Talking Cures: Home speakers, audio ads, and the contest for engagement

Amazon will reportedly monetize its site and Alexa channels in 2018 using advertising. Global Web Index, a London-based research company, reports that grocery shoppers seem to love voice speakers. Of 78,000 respondents to a survey, 56 percent are using or plan to buy a speaker in the next six months. But will those consumers love advertising? That’s the important question for marketers considering how to deploy budget effectively.

Advertising isn’t the only customer interface in local. Human relationships, storefronts, out-of-home media, and many other investments are necessary. Adding advertising to an Alexa skill may backfire. As The Economist points out,  there is an uncanny valley problem with voice. When a smart speaker acts too human, the user can become uncomfortable. In short, consumer expectations are tightly linked to what they will tolerate when dealing with bots.

Adding advertising experience in a bot may violate the consumer’s expectations. Like streaming users, who feel they have paid for media out of their own pocket and, consequently, do not welcome advertising, Alexa users are likely to object to the insertion of advertising. IBM Cloud Video found that 72.3 percent of streaming users “felt any type of ad reduced the viewing experience.” Alexa buyers have paid for a channel that promises to do tasks. Advertising remains an interruption to the consumer, it may be a mistake to impose in the smart speaker environment.

Marketers have seen an explosion of channels, in addition to myriad new sales tools to use to distribute experience to the edge of the network. Why revert to advertising, except to create more revenue for the smart speaker vendor? It does not necessarily add to the customer experience. In the local market, in particular, voice ads fail to replace the human connection consumers expect from a device/service they purchased. Perhaps the better move is to augment local salespeople using AI, instead.

The smartest speaker will know when to connect a potential customer to the human who can close the deal and build trust. ###