Mornings are prime time for voice. Implications for news & content providers.

Much to the chagrin of my wife, the first 3 things I say each morning are:

“Alexa, good morning” as I enter the living room.

“Alexa, what’s new?” to get a concise breakdown of the business, sports and general news.

“Alexa, how’s my day look?” for the first items on my calendar, before asking for Pandora.

And it seems that I’m not alone — many others are starting their days with their Amazon Echo devices.

Why has this become so habit-forming? Because it’s absolutely effortless to activate and to consume news & entertainment, while continuing with the morning routine of preparing breakfast & the kids’ school lunches.

This represents opportunity and challenges for news and content providers:

Understand that this is prime time.

These are the 8–10 most precious minutes any brand could hope to have with me: 100% undivided attention when my mind is at its clearest.

It’s subconsciously programmed into my schedule — the nearest thing to appointment-viewing, outside of live sports.

Content providers, you can go back to creating great content.

Flash Briefings have a super high signal-to-noise ratio. They have to: since audio is linear, people aren’t going to put up with irrelevant content. Time is too valuable. I’ve disabled Flash Briefings within the first minute if they fail to deliver.

This is the beauty of on-demand voice/audio: it allows you to differentiate through quality content as opposed to SEO or clickbait headlines.

While you’re at it, put some effort into the production as well. Use real audio — like, a human wouldn’t hurt. One respected newspaper has a Flash Briefing which consists of Alexa reading out their RSS feed. Don’t do this. Shove an intern into a room with an iPhone and a tambourine if you must, but make an effort.

Voice/audio beats Facebook for news, hands-down.

A recent poll reported that two-thirds of U.S. adults get their news from social media. We’d all agree that that holds true beyond the US too. And for much of the world, that means predominantly Facebook.

Maybe it’s just me but that seems a pretty inefficient way to find one’s news … being sucked into an infinite feed of clickbait & ads before coming up for air 25 minutes later, only to realize you’re none the wiser for the experience.

Tomorrow’s ‘influencers’ will be in voice and they will be great.

A podcaster will start a 2-minute daily Flash Briefing and absolutely cane it. Probably a comedian. I look forward to that. Give me 2 minutes of intelligent opinion, wit and personality over today’s social media.

Their sponsors will appreciate the real, hard listener analytics too, as opposed to the number of likes of an Instagram photo where their brand has nothing to do with the reason the photo was liked.

Rounding up, the morning ritual is active, deep engagement on a daily basis. Which brand wouldn’t want that? This is a land grab right now for some of the most precious minutes of a person’s day, and content companies absolutely should be there now.

Oh, and by the way, all brands which are selling something are in the content business.