While covering Conversational Commerce, I’ve been waiting more than a decade for the (re)-introduction of Conversational Advertising. Under the slogan “People talk, brands listen,” Nuance is launching a Conversational Ad initiative with Nuance Voice Ads. Bear in mind, I believe that an important definition for “advertising” is “information that supports a transaction;” plain and simple. That means that the output of relevant recommendation engines, blog posts, Web landing pages and product searches all fall into that category. And guess what: As users of Apple’s Siri or Google’s Voice Search well know, you get plenty of information to support transactions by simply saying what you’re looking for and hearing a relevant response.

This being April 1, 2013 (and the day that Google announced that YouTube has been a 10 year contest to find the World’s Best Home Videos and is coming to an end) I have been looking for evidence that the new product might be a bit tongue in cheek. But overwhelming evidence is that Nuance is building excitement around an creative agency and mobile ad network-driven approach to conversational advertising. As Mike McSherry, Nuance’s VP of Advertising and Content, demonstrates in this video:

In this report in Xconomy, Benjamin Romano says that the demo actually included 50 different dialogues. More importantly, Nuance is providing dialogue developers with an SDK (software development kit) that makes it simple to create a conversational ad that works across platforms. According to the Web site, “Ad creators need only a basic understanding of JavaScript in order to harness the power of Nuance’s advanced speech recognition platform. With our simplified libraries advertisers have found that creating a Nuance Voice Ad is simple, consistent across platforms, and opens up entirely new dimensions of user engagement.”

No sweat, Right?

Nuance has clearly been doing a lot of work in the background. It has, in effect, defined a new advertising format that takes into account industry standards from the IAB (Internet Advertising Bureau) and its MRAID (Mobile Rich Ad Interface Definitions) specification. Nuance’s advertising group under McSherry has apparently forged relationships with several interactive agencies, naming Leo Burnett, OMD and Digitas as initial partners. It is also working with leading mobile advertising networks Millennial Media and JumpTap to ensure broader reach and distribution.

As to my “Back to the Future” reference. My friends on Twitter reminded me that I first wrote about the potential for targeted voice-based ads back in the 1990s (and probably long before that) as a medium called “Audiotex” was taking form. As with most early speech-based technologies, it involved greatly structured dialogues. Callers would either dial a specific phone line, for news, sports or weather. Or they could dial a “voice portal” like Tellme’s 800-555-TELL, which allowed callers to essentially bark out the purpose of their call. These services were either offered on a pay-per-call basis or supported by general advertising, in the form of a preamble or promotional message that was “played” in the course of the interaction.

Nuance Voice Ads are tangibly different because they appear to be integrated with a voice-based assistant (like Nina) running on a subscriber’s device (or perhaps a Web site). The dialogue can be much less structured and more conversational. Whether it is “comfortable” to wireless subscribers and contextual depends on execution. My sense is that advertisers – and their agencies and networks – will need a lot of hand-holding initially in order to create and distribute the sorts of interactive messages that delight mobile subscribers while they provide promotional messages. It is very early days but, if “brands” are going to start listening to their prospects and customers in order to deliver relevant promotional messages, creation of Conversational Ads is a good place to start.

Updated: 11:48AM (Pacific) April 1, 2013

Categories: Articles

Tags: Opus Research, Nuance, conversational commerce, Mobile Advertising