Driving Forward
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What does your brand sound like?
It took 200,000 years for the world population to reach 7.6 billion people and only a few years for 1 billion assistive technology devices to be spoken to. We are talking to robots that tell us jokes, write emails while we drive, and read our children bedtime stories.
The innovation in how brands reach their consumers in this new era of voice reminds me of where video was a decade ago. (In 2006 I joined YouTube as the CMO). The first ads that ran on YouTube were 30 second spots, most of them developed for linear television. These early ads were called Participatory Video Ads (PVAs). They ran only on the YouTube homepage and were unskippable. Today in video we have formats that are skippable, short form (6 seconds) and contextual. They are adaptive to desktop and mobile and some ads are only billed if watched. We’ve come a long way in figuring out how to best leverage digital video as a marketing vehicle.
CES 2019 in many ways marks the start of what will be a similar path for audio. We are indeed early days as the naming convention isn’t set. Audio? Sonic? Voice? Sound? What will we call the marketing messages that will populate these assistive voice triggered services? While mobile apps like Pandora and Spotify have been trading in audio ads for years, the new enhancement of assistive voice technology will spark new models and experiences.
The thought I had leaving Vegas (for the umpteenth time) was a simple one.
“Huh, we all know what the top 100 brands look like, but what do they sound like?” Flash logos from Toyota, Apple, McDonald’s, AT&T, and Mercedes in front of me and I know them. I heard about a study on children and the recognition of over 50 corporate brands by the age of five. The only brand I can *hear* today is Intel, maybe AOL and a few others. This will be the decade where 7.6B people (or really just the billion that use these assistive devices) begin to associate a sound as a signal for a feeling about a brand.
Having spent the better part of the last 12 years at Google focused on video, display and search, I’m looking forward to this next era of *sound* and to working with brands and our own Israeli-based Waze Product team as we pioneer around voice-enablement in the car.
Let’s see how much progress we can all make by CES 2020 ;)
-Suzie
Suzie Reider, Managing Director, Waze Advertising, North America
