Future of Advertising : Interactive Voice Ads
Could ads become less annoying in the future?
Most pure-play B2C e-businesses make money through one or more of the following tactics:-
1. Selling physical goods (retailing)
2. Selling services (subscriptions)
3. Selling visibility (advertising)
4. Renting user data
When it comes to advertising, businesses have the following options:-
1. Real Estate Model where advertisers have to only pay a hefty one-time amount (on basis of size, position, and time) to get their ad published on the website
2. Cost-per-1000 Impressions (CPM) where advertisers pay for every 1000 times their ad was viewed
3. Cost-per-Click (CPC) where advertisers pay only when a user clicks on their ad
4. Cost-per-Lead (CPL) where advertisers pay only when they turn a user into a potential lead i.e. a user furnishes valuable information like contact details, demographic information, etc.
5. Cost-per-Acquisition (CPA) where advertisers pay only when they turn a user/potential lead into a customer (This is the ultimate goal)
Advertisers, for obvious reasons, favor performance-related methods (CPA > CPL > CPC > CPM > Real Estate Model) while website owners on the other hand rally for methods that guarantee revenue (Real Estate Model > CPM > CPC > CPL > CPA).
Now, what if a new method is introduced into the equation? Lately, quite a few online platforms/e-businesses (mostly music streaming services) and advertisers have been experimenting on interactive voice advertising which is kind of like zero-click advertising (Not to be confused with the established Domain Redirect method).
What is interactive voice advertising?
Interactive voice advertising basically allows users to listen to and respond conversationally to ad content. Instead of being in the visual or video format, the ad is in an audio format and users can only hear it, not see it. Interactive voice ads allow listeners to respond to a brand’s call-to-action by asking for more information about a product, placing a direct order, or completely skipping past the ad. At the beginning of each interactive voice ad, users are informed that they are listening to a new type of ad that requires verbal engagement. If the user says “no” or does not respond within a few seconds, the ad is skipped and the user is promptly redirected to the platform. Think of it as a blend between modern-age voice assistants and traditional radio ads.
Why interactive voice advertising?
Let’s face it. Ads are annoying. We almost always skip ads and hardly ever remember the brands whose ads we came across while using online products and services. They are intrusive and greatly lower the bar of a great customer experience. But the websites have no choice. They need ad revenue to keep themselves cash-flow positive. Yes, a lot of platforms are now shifting towards a subscription-based model but that’s a different debate altogether and out of the scope of this article. Interactive voice ads have the advantage of being essentially invisible. The frustrating visual component of ads (be it those screen-hijacking interstitials or jack-in-the-box popups) is absent. Even with native ads that combine advertising messages with user-centric content to make them appear as a part of the app’s content, the frustration eventually comes after a user clicks on the ad only to be fooled. In my opinion, it is kind of sneaky to have an ad masquerading as app content with the sole purpose to lure users into clicking on it.
Interactive voice ads add a layer of engagement and authenticity and can enable advertisers to gain more insights on what users are interested in, which can enhance targeting opportunities. Even users don’t have to navigate through the wealth of information they are attacked with after clicking on an ad to hunt for the one useful piece of information they actually require. With audio ads, both users and advertisers can be precise and to-the-point, and perhaps drive higher conversions. In fact, at a time when consumers have become more accustomed and comfortable talking to digital voice assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant, interactive voice ads may be welcomed as a fresh alternative to traditional text, image, rich media, and video ad formats. According to a report by Juniper Research, there were 2.5 billion digital voice assistants in use in 2019, and that figure is expected to grow to 8 billion by 2023.
How music streaming services are employing interactive voice ads
Music-streaming services have been experimenting with this new audio ad format for months, and it makes a lot of logical sense for them considering that users are not staring at the screen while listening to music. The likelihood of a user to react to an audio ad than to click on a text/video ad is greater, simply because when someone is listening to music or a podcast on their phone, the app window is out of view. Pandora, an American music streaming internet radio service recently launched voice ads into wider public testing by roping in a wide range of brands such as Doritos, KFC, Unilever, The Home Depot, Volvo, Wendy’s, Comcast and Nestlé. For example, a Wendy’s ad asked listeners if they were hungry, and if they say “yes,” the ad continued with a recommendation of what to eat. According to TechCrunch, Pandora’s own data indicated that the ads have been fairly well-received, in terms of the voice format; 47% of users said they either liked or loved the concept of responding with their voice, 30% felt neutral, and in general 72% of users said they found the ad format easy to engage with. Considering that people absolutely detest ads in general, this is promising news.
Spotify also tested the voice ads in 2019 by roping in Unilever brand Axe and using Spotify Studios to promote the original podcast “Stay Free: The Story of The Clash” with the difference being that it only focused on content promotion within its own service — not anything outside of its app. It allowed users to choose to opt out of voice ads in the Settings menu, if they prefer, under “Voice-Enabled Ads” and also choose to entirely disable the microphone access in the mobile device’s Settings. This is to ensure that the customer experience remains intact and no one has to listen to ads if they chose to opt out in the first place.
Challenges remain
Even though interactive audio ads are less annoying and more user-friendly, it’s a challenge to measure the engagement rate and select the right metrics to track the ad performance. In fact, there is a need to invent new metrics altogether. With traditional display ads, it’s fairly convenient to track the efficacy of ads by using metrics such as CTR (Click-Through-Rate), RPM (Revenue-per-1000 Impressions), and RPC (Revenue-per-Click). There is no clear consensus on how to calculate the return on audio ad spends. However, challenges provide an opportunity to innovate and Pandora came up with a new metric called “Say-Through-Rate,” which can capture verbal engagement, both positive and negative, and thus allow advertisers to measure the effectiveness of their ads’ reach. Quantitative insights such as the number of times an ad was played, the number of two-way conversations recorded between the user & ad, and the ratio of ads skipped by the user saying “no” versus ads skipped by the user staying silent, and qualitative insights about the kind of follow-up questions users asked, product categories favored etc., could be thoroughly studied and analyzed to come up with even more powerful metrics.
Closing Thoughts
Erik Barraud, SVP of Product Management at the audio advertising tech company AdsWizz says — “I think we can create very much a win-win model where you can create relevant, non-disruptive ad experiences for users so they are willing to engage with it. Hence higher value for advertisers, who are willing to pay a higher price to engage with those audiences.”
It would be exciting to see how interactive voice ads play out and evolve in the future, especially in platforms outside music streaming. After all, in this age where customer experience largely dictates the success of a product, it’s high time that the ad experience also undergoes a major transformation and becomes more intuitive and interactive, and less invasive and intrusive.
