Currently in India, voice-based assistant device market segment is virtually non-existent. Lack of familiarity with the new way of doing things is the key barrier for the category. Globally Google and Apple are key/ potential competitors in this market segment – Google with Google Home and Apple with HomePod. Google, with its 96% smartphone market segment share and its support for Hindi and English, is the most significant competitor in India and has fully integrated the voice in their latest phone as well (Google Pixel). Google has also launched Google Home (GH) a month before the Amazon Echo launch, having a head-start with voice integrations within their existing mobile and desktop endpoints (Google Ok/Google assistant).

In response, ideally we’d just get everyone’s hands on Amazon Echo, but we were conscious of the fact that we were launching a device no one had any experience with and therefore we would have an issue with product confidence. We also needed a clear separation from the on-phone Google Assistant experience to create a mind and physical space for Amazon Echo.

To achieve this, we decided to proactively demonstrate our functions right in consumers’ faces, without their prompt .. via music.

Globally, the most engaging and attractive use case for users and non-users of Amazon Echo devices is the music it plays on demand. This insight held even more true in India, the land of music lovers where 90% of YouTube viewers use it to play music.

Hence, we went where our prospective customers were going for music - YouTube

Being incredibly single-minded, we set out to show everyone how Amazon Echo works ... Simply, by echoing their commands on an advertisement in Alexa's voice.

An in-depth understanding of the users searches told us what music they were looking for.

We created pre-roll ads that would play before these searches. Whenever consumers actively searched for content to entertain themselves, Alexa, Amazon Echo’s personality would respond specifically to their search using her own voice, taking them by surprise in the pre-rolls. Since every pre-roll followed by an actual YouTube video resulting from what they searched, echoing their commands in between made the experience entirely seamless and very similar to real-life scenarios. From a consumer PoV, this was solid proof that Amazon Echo had a real role in the consumers life

The data pointed us to 1700 musicians and albums that were popular with our audience. We created 1700 YouTube Pre-roll ads for these albums and musicians.

The second layer of targeting came into play in choosing playlists that were most viewed to tag with our pre-roll ads.

Now when consumers searched for their music, Alexa was smartly integrated into the situation and mimicked their commands on search for that specific music .. demonstrating vividly the role of Amazon Echo in everyday life!

Our business results were definitely impressive:

32.6% lift in ad recall

28.6% rise in awareness

59% market share at launch, rocketing Amazon Echo to the leader position

But what was even more impressive was the RoI that the campaign brought in .. 10X savings in money without losing the impact