Friday, April 21, 2017

When are Ads Too Obtrusive?

Last month Google rolled out audio ads for the Google Home device. Usually when people would ask the device something they would receive the answer and the device would shut off. With the audio ads though an advertisement would be added to the end of the answer which was obviously bothersome to many people.

 Not only was it annoying to be spoken to about the new movie Beauty and the Beast from a speaker, the ads were unrelated to the users. Luckily for the people annoyed by this feature it was short lived and Google removed it.

Hopefully they do not reintroduce this anytime in the near future and if they do, they will be more subtle.


Posted by at 1:45 PM

2 comments:

  1. UnknownApril 21, 2017 at 2:35 PM

    I believe this is the perfect case where Google could have avoided this little PR nightmare by having focus groups. I am sure, that with a random selection of the target market that was going to be buying the Google device they would all agree that the advertisements at the end of the response is very unwanted, and would for sure result in bad reviews of the product. So I hope Google learns a lesson from this in that they can't always be right on the first try, and sometimes a focus group is what is in their best interest.

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  2. UnknownApril 21, 2017 at 6:29 PM

    I think that people were more upset because the ads came from a product that they payed for. Ads are usually the result of using a free service so to have them pop up on something that you payed for is probably jarring.

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