The ad is coming to Alexa! Amazon has announced the opening of a program allowing brands to record the personal assistant’s answers about their products themselves. Answers that will necessarily be oriented…
Voice assistants are very practical on a daily basis for instantly answering a question or controlling connected objects in the home without touching a keyboard or remote control, simply with your voice. Previously present exclusively on smartphones, they ended up emancipating themselves and settling in the heart of homes – speakers, televisions, remote controls, robot vacuum cleaners, headphones and earphones, etc. They are part of everyday life and fit perfectly into the landscape, to the point that we use them with confidence, like Alexa, Amazon’s intelligent voice assistant, integrated in particular in Echo products. However, it could soon have an impact on our choices and purchases. After all, we must not forget that the e-commerce giant is still the third largest advertising platform in the United States, behind Google and Meta, and he does not intend to stop there! At its Accelerate conference, Amazon unveiled a new feature for Alexa: giving affiliate brands the ability to self-record answers to the questions most frequently asked by users about their products. A clever way to slip advertising into voice messages…
Alexa: soon answers sponsored by brands
Since its creation, Alexa has answered a question asked of it by retrieving information from the Internet, via a search engine. But Amazon’s “smart” voice assistant will soon use other sources for its answers. Indeed, with its brand new program called Customers Ask Alexa – “customers ask Alexa”, in French -, to any brand affiliated with the e-commerce giant – that is to say having a shop in line on Amzon – from knowing the most frequently asked questions about its products by users to the voice assistant. From there, she will be able to choose herself the answer to give – in a not very objective way, obviously… The service will be accessible by invitation from October 2022, with a deployment for all American sellers planned for the beginning of 2023, as announced Amazon’s official press release.
To justify such a decision, Rajiv Mehta, director of Alexa Shopping, explains that“Amazon recognizes that brands are experts in their fields and in their products. With this new capability, we’re making it easier for them to connect with customers by helping them answer the most common questions.” Still, if this novelty is free for sellers, it is not without ulterior motives. Indeed, creating new advertising space can be a powerful argument for attracting new sellers to Amazon, who will then benefit from new exposure. And Jeff Bezos’ platform will come out on top, since people who are tempted by sponsored responses will make their purchases through Amazon, which will allow him to earn his commission on sales…