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Alexa, whatever happened to interactive voice ads? You know the ones: An ad plays on your smart speaker, and you ask it to conveniently add the mentioned items to your shopping cart—anything from detergent to bananas to books. Interactive audio ads were once touted as the evolution of audio advertising. And while platforms, brands and agencies are still in the voice game, the excitement around the technology has faded.
With the emergence of voice-activated speaker assistants, an advertising element was inevitable.
Yet, despite the technology being present in millions of homes and offices around the world, it has yet to fulfill the heavily predicted promise of the rise of voice interactivity within advertising and video commerce.
“The default to ads isn’t that we interact with them. It’s that we don’t,” said business transformation consultant Tom Goodwin. “So they’ve failed because we failed to provide any reason for anyone to interact with a smart speaker. It’s hard enough to get people to glance at ads. Even harder to get them to click. Can you imagine how hard it must be to get them to talk?”
Tech companies bet on voice
According to Insider Intelligence, 123.5 million U.S. adults used voice assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Nest at least once per month in 2022, and 48% of U.S. adults will be monthly users of this technology in the next three years, Insider predicts.
Plenty of major technology companies have placed their bets on interactive voice ads becoming popular.
In 2019, after six months of testing, subscription-based music streaming service Pandora introduced its Interactive Voice Ads function.
Claire Fanning, the company’s then-vice president of ad innovation strategy, told Adweek at the time that its initial tests had shown “unprecedented engagement rates.”
Despite the aspirations, just four years later there is no mention of interactive voice or voice commerce on parent company SXM Media’s most recent media kit to potential advertisers.
Inevitably, ecommerce giant Amazon also aimed to become a major player in the voice commerce space.
In 2021, it began promoting its own version of voice ads to the North American and U.K. markets. By using directions from a list of call-to-action (CTA) prompts to Alexa, consumers could add items to their online shopping carts.
