Digiday Research: Voice marketing is still nascent among retail marketers
This research is based on unique data collected from our proprietary audience of publisher, agency, brand and tech insiders. It’s available to Digiday+ members. More from the series →
Voice devices are quickly becoming ubiquitous in U.S. households, but most retail marketers aren’t jumping on the bandwagon just yet.
Nearly 20 percent of U.S. adults now have access to a smart speaker, and that number is expected to grow rapidly in the coming years. But despite the hype surrounding their potential most retailers aren’t currently using voice devices for marketing or commerce, according to new Digiday research.
Of the retail marketing executives Digiday quizzed with at the Digiday Retail Forum last month, 79 percent said they’ve yet to use voice devices in any capacity.
For those who have the most common use cases are to deliver ads and to sell products, but each of those are only being done by 8 percent of retailers. In general marketers have placed a low priority on voice marketing with many viewing it primarily as a way to collect consumer data.
Amazon, a major player in the voice space thanks to its Alexa-powered devices, is tempering expectations for voice search. The e-commerce giant is still figuring out how to prioritize between paid and organic results in search requests.
Other areas like branded podcasts are unlikely to ever gain mainstream adoption by retail marketers because of their high costs, generally at least $500,000. Some retailers in the Digiday survey have experimented with them, but one of the main hurdles with branded podcasts or podcasts in general is that measurement standards are still in their infancy.
Other brands are gravitating instead to branded “skills” for voice-activated devices. Lego is testing out creating storytelling Skills on Amazon, for example.
More in Marketing
More brands are blending deterministic and probabilistic data for hybrid targeting approaches
Advertisers are exploring AI-assisted lookalike modeling for new audience targeting approaches — brought on by the fading third-party cookie.
The Home Depot adds another acronym — ‘ROMO’ — in next phase of negotiating retail media network measurement
The Home Depot is pitching a new acronym: ROMO, or return on marketing objectives, in addition to return on ad spend (ROAS) to help marketers paint a more holistic picture of their campaign efficacy.
‘It’s become a personality brand now’: Why Tesla’s brand perception is in a tricky spot as sales slump
Elon Musk has become a polarizing figure given his role in President Donald Trump’s administration and it looks like the ripple effects of that polarization are affecting the Tesla brand.