While the advertising and marketing world loves talking about conversations, the reality is that paying someone to have real, one-to-one conversations tends to be expensive and difficult to scale. Nuance, a Massachusetts-based technology company, just might have the answer, with their newly lanched ‘Nuance Voice Ads’, a new interactive ad format that allows mobile ads to ‘talk back to consumers’ using Siri-like functionality.
So, for example, after clicking on an ad, a user might be able to ask a question about a product, or perhaps about an event/piece of content a brand was sponsoring, and receive a reply that also incorporates some brand messaging (see the example in the video below). Nuance hope their ads will transform mobile display advertising from ‘tiny, inferior billboards’ into ‘high-quality consumer interactions that occur in non-retail environments’.
Nuance even go as far to suggest that one day ‘CPC’ pricing may even take on an entirely new meaning: ‘Cost Per Conversation’. Nuance say the ads fully comply with industry standards from the IAB and the MRAID specifications, and ad creators only require a basic understanding of JavaScript in order to use their SDK and speech recognition platform.
