Say My Name: "Branded Skill" Advertising

You’re probably asking yourself what we mean by “Branded Skill” advertising. Think of whatever device you have in your home, like Amazon Alexa, Echo, Google Home, and similar smart home devices. When you’re listening to your morning playlist, news, or radio you might hear a brief commercial-like statement after the broadcast is over. This is called a “Flash Briefing.” Although the functionality of speaker advertising is low, it is an amazing form of advertising because so few do it. 

Here are a couple of ways to get on this new 2019 trend:

1)  Branded Skills and Apps

This is the most common form of speaker advertising. Create a “branded skill” for Alexa, or an app for Google Home that is related to your brand, industry, or service. Patrón recently started using this tactic. When listening to your Amazon Alexa you can say, “Ask Patrón for a cocktail recipe.” The listener gets the recipe that they’ve asked for, they have to remember to say the brand name in their request, and then the Alexa will read off the ingredient list and repeat the brand. It’s a pretty cool tactic to make your audience aware of your product or service.

Try asking Alexa, “Who’s the best?”

Another example of a product using Alexa for promotion is Tide - the laundry detergent. Customer interaction doesn’t really come to mind when thinking about removing stains, does it? Well their branded skill, Stain Remover, will walk the consumer through over 200 ways to remove stains. 

2) Flash Briefs

Flash briefing is a natural advertisement tactic for these home devices. The consumer creates a flash briefing for their home device, it could be Alexa listing the weather, their calendar and then going into their favorite podcasts. You can purchase ad time on the Alexa version of podcasts and news stories so that your consumer hears your advertisement daily during their morning flash briefing. 

These advertising opportunities should be coordinated directly with the publisher of the content, because Google Home and Amazon Alexa do not have formal advertising programs set up for their smart speaker marketing and advertising, yet. 

However, you should start planning for this sort of advertising now. It might be a good idea to start with advertising on some local podcasts first to determine the return-on-investment for your ad spend. Once you’ve seen some initial successes, then you should begin making plans to go for broader audiences by advertising on smart home speakers and devices. 

If you would like to learn more how OMNICOMMANDER is deploying these types of advertising tactics, reach out today! 800-807-3109