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The ability for brands to speak with customers as individuals and address their needs within the context of their own unique customer journeys remains one of the universal acmes of marketing. If a recent voice dialogue Infiniti campaign is any indication, it’s the emerging era of voice that just might provide a shortcut to speeding up many of these individualized ongoing customer relationships.
Advances in audio advertising technologies have now enabled a new customer engagement opportunity via the surfacing of continuous dialogue advertising. This net new digital advertising strategy promises interactive brand-consumer experiences that are more engaging and less intrusive to listeners, compared to traditional passive audio advertising. It also allows brands to continue ongoing conversations with customers based on their responses during previous interactions.
In practice, a listener engaging with a continuous dialogue ad (delivered via a music streaming app, for example) is prompted to respond to an offer by voicing their response. Using their natural language, they can either respond affirmatively to accept an offer or negatively to skip the ad and quickly return to their regular audio content. From an advertiser perspective, continuous dialogue advertising also provides rich, real-time metrics unprecedented in the audio advertising space, making it now possible to execute data-driven campaign optimization on audio like never before.
This is a sea change for audio advertising, which has traditionally lacked the equivalent of the click metric that made visual advertising such a successful medium for decades. Audio ads can now utilize detailed metrics far surpassing simple engagement data. By leveraging AI and deep learning mechanisms, continuous dialogue ad metrics track factors correlating with ad conversion even down to each word included in ad copy, enabling ad optimization that is particularly data-informed and can be much more effective. Combine this with the capability to re-engage individual listeners in a continuous manner, picking up conversations where they left off and zeroing in on the most appropriate appeal for each individual, and it becomes clear that continuous dialogue ads equip brands with an exceptionally powerful toolset for realizing more meaningful customer engagement via audio.
This potential manifested in our initial continuous dialogue ad campaign enabled through Instreamatic’s platform, which was designed to increase potential customers’ knowledge of the new Infiniti QX50 Crossover and get listeners to either test drive the vehicle or visit the vehicle’s page on the Infiniti site. First-time listeners heard a prompt to respond by voice to a short skippable ad teaser, asking them to sign up to test drive the QX50. Those listeners who expressed an interest were given more information on the vehicle in the following AI-driven voice response and were then directed to the Infiniti QX50 test drive landing page.
Listeners who said they were not interested in the initial ad were later re-approached with a new audio ad creative in which the conversation focused on simply learning more about the QX50 and its benefits by viewing vehicle images and information on the Infiniti site. In either case, all delivered ads beyond the first were shaped by the history of each individual listeners’ previous answers, thus achieving a continuous dialogue between that specific listener and the Infiniti brand.
As a result of this individualized continuing dialogue, 5.5% of listeners who declined the offer in the first conversation asked to receive more information (and more personalized) about the vehicle after the second dialogue. Overall, 19.31% of total listeners engaged in a dialogue with our brand. Nearly half (45%) of that audience also engaged with the campaign when presented with a second conversation. The conversion rate achieved was 5.24% of consumers who demonstrated their interest by watching a target video and clicking on the link. And whenever a listener expressed their disinterest in an ad, their normal audio content experience quickly resumed, preserving our goodwill as brand advertisers.
With that, they’ve largely learned to tune out. They can instead present naturally engaging, metric-driven creative that meaningfully grows the customer-brand relationship over the course of a campaign.
