Children today are growing up in a voice-first world. A place where computers interact with us, understand our voices, then act upon commands. Last year saw massive growth in voice technology, as companies began rolling out ‘personal assistants.’ Thus, voice technology was one of the highest upward trends in 2016.
So, what does this mean? Two words: data mining. For those unfamiliar, data mining is the process of turning raw data into useful information by looking at patterns. Data mining has been used by marketing strategists to increase sales and decrease costs for many years.
With voice technology, the implications are daunting as this tech is listening into your conversations and extracting words from everything you say. Going forward, this has large implications for advertising, as we live in a world where privacy is a fleeting privilege.
From hardware devices that sit in your home like Amazon Echo and Amazon Alexa to voice technology software that lives in your everyday devices such as your smartphone, we are surrounded by microphones and this relationship is seldom a passive one.
New technologies that include microphones collect information on what they hear and they can do so with the permissions we sign away in privacy policies. Computers then compile information into datasets used to target our needs based on the information we have divulged.
Scary, right? Well, yes and no. We are a drop in the ocean, our marketing footprint is merely a series of 1’s and 0’s which attempt to provide you with advertising that you can (hopefully) enjoy. From an advertising perspective, it can turn more leads into sales, cost less money, and give helpful data that could be the difference between success and failure.
It is our job at Think Profits to see how a ‘voice technology’ shift can be a benefit to companies. Rest assured, this trend isn’t going anywhere. The shift to a more mainstream adoption of voice technology hardware will only come when it exists at a lower failure rate. Currently, voice technology remains on the buggy side. These glitches are keeping ‘personal assistants’ from growing rapidly into homes.
However, even though consumers don’t all use voice technology – for advertisers it is just a matter of being nearby the microphone on any smart-device.
Data-mining works well and continues to improve. Over time, and with the assistance of voice technology, everybody will have an advertising footprint. A collection of data for advertisers to use and collect. Is the benefit of having more appealing ads worth the cost of your privacy?
Does your business need help strategizing the best advertising avenue for your brand? Think Profits can help you expand your share-of-voice across all digital mediums and reach your customers faster. Check out our website or give us a call for more information!
