In 2018, Mercedes Benz took the year off from having a Super Bowl ad, running more unconventional promotions while biding their time and recalibrating their marketing. This was a bit of a departure, as the company had run marquee commercials during The Big Game for 4 of the previous 7 years.
Perhaps of note is that the company had suffered poor reviews of some of its Super Bowl campaigns, setting the stage for an all-important moment during Super Bowl LIII, taking place in the conveniently-named Mercedes Benz Stadium in Atlanta at the start of 2019.
Voice and AI were accelerating by this point - see the week’s stories in This Week In Voice in the episode preceding the big game - but consumers were mainly still wrapping their heads around what to do with smart speakers in the home.
That’s when Mercedes came out and hit hard with Say The Word, their pivotal 2019 Super Bowl ad which would not only receive widespread acclaim, but would establish an entirely new conversation around voice in the car.
This was the first Super Bowl commercial featuring a voice assistant in a vehicle, and is noteworthy for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that the car itself doesn’t even make an appearance until the final part of the ad.
Focusing on giving the consumer power over his or her environment, and then centering that power within the vehicle, all through voice and conversational AI, deeply resonated with a mainstream audience.
When 2019 was over and Mercedes Benz looked back at the year it put on the board, the voice-enabled A-Class vehicle spotlighted in this Super Bowl ad was one of the lone bright spots that helped lift the company amidst some other challenges that year.
All of this brings us to today, and the webinar Mercedes is hosting, and I will be moderating, this Thursday July 30 at 1 PM Eastern / 10 AM Pacific. (The webinar is free and open to the public. Register here.)
For a company that has set the tone for voice in the car, Mercedes acknowledges that the global pandemic has accelerated adoption of voice and AI across almost every vertical. The intersection of voice, AI, and the car is wider and richer now.
Consequently, the bar is now raised for what voice interfaces and voice assistants can and should be doing to support a better, safer driving experience.
Some new information will be shared in this webinar, along with a special demo.
We know there’s an unending sea of online events. Make time for this one.
I’ll see you there.
This Week In Voice VIP is now sponsored by our friends at DefinedCrowd.
If you like what we’re doing with this daily letter, do us, them, and yourself a favor by checking them out.
After raising over $50M earlier this year, they’ve launched DefinedData, a data marketplace likely to be of great interest to the companies reading this.
Please drop me a line if you talk to them and strike up a friendship.
I’ll have much more to say about DefinedCrowd in one of my letters later in August.
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