An Alexa-Free Super Bowl
Last weekend was different.
The biggest fete was Taylor Swift making it from Tokyo in time to watch her boyfriend win the Super Bowl. Temu made a splash but Amazon?
Amazon and Google were all over the Super Bowl for the past few years. Both these companies use analytics and testing and it’s likely that over the psat few years, they just didn’t see the need for brand building of a new product. The returns were diminishing.
Temu? Who the heck is Temu? That’s exactly the type of response you want to get after running Super Bowl ads.
If the point of a TV ad from the point of view of a technology company is to increase awareness of its brand to a target audience of late adopters, then Amazon doesn’t need this any longer. Almost everyone in the target audience of Amazon knows of Alexa and has already considered whether the device makes sense for them or not. Google still advertises for its phones because, well, it still needs that brand awareness.
What’s still amazing is that the Super Bowl itself has spun out a counter competition of who will spend more. I was checking out ads and ad spend before I knew who actually won.
What an Alexa-free Super Bowl means is that the voice assistant device has hit maturity. That also means there’s an opportunity for a new category killer to emerge.
