Creating an Alexa habit

Smart speaker skills have proliferated but most reporting I've read suggests there has been little actual usage of these skills.  Instead, smart speakers are mostly used for listening to broadcast terrestrial radio, listening to music, setting timers/alarms/reminders, and getting the weather/news.

If I worked on a smart speaker project (in particular, Alexa), I would try a Trojan horse to get people to develop habits to use the speaker more in order to exploit its potential.

Two specific ideas: 

One: team up with public radio to allow listeners to contribute to pledge drives by voice.  This feels less commercial and more altruistic and so would be a nice path to getting people comfortable with purchasing by voice.  For those without linked credit cards (is that even possible with Alexa?  Maybe if Google wanted to do something similar with Google Home as Google has fewer credit cards on file), the system could at least take a command to send an email reminder with a simple one-click donation button for an amount already specified.  I think of this as a variation of Amazon Smile.

Two: work with radio (and podcasters) to make ads (including those on public radio - there's no lack of them) voice-aware by offering discounts or similar promotions to those who indicate interest by voice.  Again, expanding people's comfort zones with new voice interactions would seem useful to get Alexa to where Amazon would like Alexa to be.  This is a variation of the promotional code which appears on lots of podcast advertisements; those codes feel anachronistically low-tech.  A smart speaker knows your email address - why memorize a code if the speaker can simply send it to the listener?  This of course would create valuable information on engagement and interactivity for marketers by proving that people are listening to ads and showing concrete follow-up (promo codes would be custom and thus much better than the wholesale generic codes now being used that don't directly link listening with use of the code).  I think of this as matching the evidence based marketing of Google Ad clicks.

To be clear, I'm perfectly happy without another intrusive, advertising platform but was just thinking about the strange stagnation and limited use cases of the voice platforms given the presumed interest in Amazon of using Alexa to embed itself more deeply in our transactional lives.

U2 and the circle of endorsements

Just a thought on how funny it has been to see U2 migrate from Apple, to Palm, to RIMM, and back to Apple over the past several years.

Targeted broadcast television advertising

Given the high value of digital advertising, much of which is based upon the better targeting, why haven't cable providers and broadcasters joined forces to deliver targeted ads?  I think this should be relatively straightforward (massive because of the numbers but straightforward nevertheless): with broadcasters' permission, cable providers would replace the ads with those better targeted to the specific household.  Delivery should be relatively simple.  Ads could be pre-loaded during low demand periods to avoid the need to stream ads in realtime (DVR equipped cable boxes may be able to do this without hardware modifications).

I believe advertisers would object if they perceive their ratecards as losing value (we paid for x households, instead we got y).  So we would have a combination of broadcast program and narrowcast ads. Which, in fact, is how adserving works generally anyway.  And could very well be why Google is getting in the broadband business.

iAd

Wow.  Although this was largely expected, it still feels weird to realize that Apple is going to be deeply involved in advertising.  And, it's actually hard to describe their position - I think it is selling advertising space (but, because it is Apple and the tight control that comes along with it), advertising services, and the medium itself.  It is like Panasonic manufacturing the television, owning some (but not all) of the channels, having control over a certain type of channel (those that opt into iAd), helping create/approve the advertising, etc.  It's a very global system and very much shuts google out of advertising on apps that go the iAd route.  And, if built very neatly into the SDK, will be hard to resist simply opting into iAd as a default for occasional developers.  Google will really need to create a drop-in ad system for apps that goes beyond display ads.

Separately, it never occurred to me until two seconds ago with Google's auto-complete, that the "App Store" is two letters away from the "Apple Store".

freecreditreport.com

I don't really understand those ubiquitous ads - why would not knowing my credit score result in working as a minstrel (or singing waiter, etc.)? Not being able to buy a home, get a credit card, or finance a car, sure. But have employment trouble?

TiVo this

Why don’t broadcasters include a link on their program websites to “TiVo this”? I understand that they would prefer not to have viewers skip through commercials. But, at the same time, I think they would prefer that: (i) it be their shows that are skipped and (ii) make the televisions automatically tune into the show on the chance that the viewer is watching live. And, perhaps, they could embed in the privacy policy something that allows them to get more finegrained insights into the viewer’s habits (but still not disclosing identity, etc.).