Google’s search bar is the go-to destination for queries, but a large portion of India’s population prefers voice to typing. This would seem a natural fit for the voice-activated Google Assistant, Google and it's partners faced the challenge of marketing it to an audience of new users who weren’t typing questions into desktop or mobile devices. Audio ads were the logical answer, but we wanted something more: Interactive audio ads at scale that would not interrupt the user’s overall experience. This led to what we believe is India's first programmatic all-Hindi voice-enabled audio ad,

where both the ad and user response was in the local language. The ads, which ran across India’s most-used music-streaming platform Gaana, reached over 5 million people with 263,823 absolute engagements.

Google’s voice-activated Assistant app, which enables people to access information online by speaking in their local language, is incredibly useful. But how to promote the product to people who aren’t currently searching the web? The answer: interactive audio ads delivered programmatically to an audience already primed to engage with voice products. Ads would center around interactive dialogue prompting listeners to respond by speaking aloud. Dialogue ads then reply with selected creative content answering the listener’s response, offering more information if the listener answered affirmatively, or quickly returning the listener to their regular audio content if the response was negative.

With a target audience of Hindi-first users of all genders age 18-44, we turned to Gaana, India’s most-used music streaming service. More specifically, we would target those who had previously set permissions to use voice commands on the service. This allowed us to reach people already primed for voice-enabled services while not interrupting those who might find such messaging disruptive. We would promote Google Assistant via easy-to-use voice ads that would give listeners an easy way to engage (or decline) and then experience the product within the ad environment. Ads were designed to be unobtrusive and useful and to quickly return users to their music or podcasts. A programmatic execution would not only give us scale, but it would allow us to leverage real-time analysis and manage the campaign for Google with a completely data-driven approach. According to our research, this was the first-ever interactive audio ad campaign executed programmatically.

Using voice-enabled interactive dialogue ad technology from Instreamatic, users already used to interacting with music-streaming service Gaana via voice were greeted with the following prompt in Hindi: “Hello! It’s Google Assistant. Would you like to learn more about how you can search using just your voice? Say yes.” Those who said “yes” were taken to a voice search demo where they could use voice search to look up cricket scores, weather, and nearby restaurants. Without ever looking at their phone or clicking anywhere on screen, users not only got to go hands-free, but actually use Google Assistant. In other words, they experienced the product right in the ad environment. If the user responded negatively, the ad quickly returns the listener to their music or podcast. Ad creative highlighted the possibilities of Google voice search, with the tagline “Bolne se sab hoga/You can do anything with your voice.”

Ads reached 5,515,017 Gaana listeners with 51,918,576 impressions and 263,823 engagements. Cumulative engagement rate across Q2 & Q3 was .51%. A Nielsen digital ad effectiveness study we commissioned found subsequent significantly positive uplift in both primary and secondary KPI of Usage Intent (10% lift) and Consideration (12% lift) in Q2 and 9% uplift for Consideration in Q3 for Google Assistant. Our campaign also overdelivered on planned reach by ~100%.