Marketers Fine-Tune IoT For The Big Show
ADWEEK|January 8, 2018

It’s not just about Alexa and Google home anymore, brands are upping their own AI game.

Lauren Johnson
Marketers Fine-Tune IoT For The Big Show

As brands increasingly seek to understand the Internet of Things, marketers are keying in on how Amazon and Google will dominate connected devices in 2018. That’s why Amazon’s Alexa and the Google Home—with their rapidly expanding sets of AI skills and services—will be completely unavoidable for the 180,000 expected attendees at this week’s annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

“It’s only been a year since Alexa got introduced to the market, and I have not seen the pace of acceleration so fast in terms of the adoption and people getting accustomed to it,” said Steven Moy, evp and chief technology officer for the U.S. at R/GA. According to data from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (neither company reports sales numbers publicly), Alexa and Google Home have sold 27 million devices in the U.S.

The result of voice assistants’ exploding popularity is a new gold rush to build branded skills “similar to the rush to build apps when the iPhone first came out and the App Store launched,” said Jeff Malmad, managing director of Mindshare North America’s Life+. And similarly now smartphones control how consumers access voice skills. “The ultimate device and gateway to the Internet of Things happens to still be your mobile phone today.”

Moy’s and Malmad’s agencies, as well as several others, noted they will have a big presence at CES to show how their companies are helping brands conquer Alexa and Google Home.

This story is from the January 8, 2018 edition of ADWEEK.

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This story is from the January 8, 2018 edition of ADWEEK.

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