Google’s latest ad for the Google Assistant includes six YouTubers, who were brought to a space in Brooklyn where Google teched it out just for them. The whole point of this was to show off Google Assistant’s Routine feature for different things. Whether that’s getting ready to go in the morning, changing the temperature in your home for your plants to stay alive, or anything else. Each YouTuber created their own video on their own channel using “Hey Google” and doing a routine with Google Assistant, which you can see here. Google also did a short behind-the-scenes video showing how it all went down, and needless to say, some of the YouTubers were pretty shocked at what Google Assistant can actually do.
For this ad blitz, Google tapped some of the biggest YouTubers around, including Todrick Hall, TheSorryGirls, Jackie Aina, Lele Pons, Katrina Garcia and The Action Lab. It made a lot of sense for Google to tap YouTubers to promote this feature of Google Assistant, seeing as YouTube is arguably more popular than regular TV, so if you’re going to make a video or a commercial, it’s better to do it on YouTube, where you’re going to get more attention. Of course, Google is also able to promote their own platform at the same time, which is a win/win for the search giant. Each of the videos done by these YouTubers do have some pretty complex routines, these are to help you get ideas on what to use Routines for, but also showcase how great they can really be to automate things that you might be doing every single day.
Background: Google announced Routines for Assistant earlier this year, and rolled it out over the summer. Essentially, it is a way for users to bundle a number of commands into just one command, with the Google Assistant. A very common one is “Hey Google, Good Morning”, in which the Google Assistant will tell you the time, the weather, how the traffic is, and also give you the latest news. Of course, these routines are all customizable, so you can have the Google Assistant do a number of different things with these routines. It’s designed to make it easier to use the Google Assistant. Instead of telling the Assistant to do five different commands, you can tell it just one, and be on about your day and such. It can be a very useful feature to have on a smart speaker or a smart display, and the customizability just keeps growing as Google adds more features to it.
Recently, Google has gone on a pretty big ad blitz, following its fall hardware event in October. This was to promote the new hardware it had debuted at the event, but to also promote the Google Assistant in a number of things. Google has been promoting a number of spots on shows on ABC. Including part of the Jimmy Kimmel Live show, where Eminem performed Venom on top of the Empire State Building in New York City, and it was entirely filmed on the Pixel 3. Google also sponsored spots on Good Morning America with Disney, and of course, that is part of its ongoing partnership with Disney. Google has been spending a ton of money on ads for the Google Assistant, Google Home Hub and Google Pixel 3 as of late, which isn’t a surprise. After all, Google is an ad company, so having it do a ton of ads is not a huge surprise, it’s kind of in their blood. But it is a good thing to see Google promoting this stuff, which is a big change from the past. When Google had its Nexus program, it didn’t really advertise its smartphones at all. But that has all changed for the better with the Pixel lineup.
Impact: Promoting Routines in Google Assistant should get more people using the Google Assistant, but more importantly, it should get more people buying Google Assistant products. For Black Friday, Google had discounted a number of its products. Including the new Google Home Hub which dropped $50 to $99, and many retailers were offering up gift cards and credit for other services along with the Home Hub. The Google Home Max also dropped $50 to $349, and the Google Home Mini saw a new low price of just $25. This made it easier for people to get the Google Assistant into their home, and hopefully use the Routines feature. It is also making it easier for people to make a smart home that is running solely on the Google Assistant. And that is important because all of this stuff can be added to the Google Assistant Routines. So in the morning, you can also have the Google Assistant turn on the lights in your kitchen, or turn on the coffee pot so that your coffee is being made while you take a shower, or read the paper (if that is still a thing these days).
Google Assistant is one of the better personal assistants out there right now, of course, the only real competition that it has is with Amazon’s Alexa. And with Alexa, it’s really only good for controlling smart home products, and a big reason for that is because Amazon is not a search engine like Google is. So if you ask Alexa something like “Who’s the President?” it’ll get that answer, but if you ask something more in depth like their height, age, weight, etc., Alexa might have trouble. Whereas Google Assistant knows all of that information because of Google Search, which is running in the back-end. Google Assistant is also becoming a more popular assistant because it is available on every single Android smartphone out there right now. Whereas Alexa is not, it is only available if you download the app, or on select smartphones that Amazon sells. Now Google is looking to make Routines a very popular feature, and that might just happen with this new ad blitz that Google is putting on, but we’ll have to wait and see.