By now, most of us are familiar with the Amazon Echo family: the original Echo, the smaller Echo Dot, and the portable Echo Tap. While we are familiar with the devices, we aren’t all familiar with the heck the Echos do. Digital home assistants are still a new concept though they are gaining more and more mainstream notoriety. Amazon helped usher them into the spotlight, and other companies, including Google, are now offering competition.
Recently, Amazon launched a brilliant campaign, called Alexa Moments, by way of a series of videos. We all know those people (or we are those people) that use digital assistants, like Siri, to ask silly questions and hear silly answers. I remember one of my favorite things to ask Siri was where to bury a body (I was asking for a friend). Well, the same is true for the Echo products. People are using them as they were intended, but they are also finding creative ways to use them. Since there are so damn many skills that you can enable for the Echo, it’s pretty hard to keep up with them – or to showcase them all in a single ad.
Amazon’s solution to this was to create and publish over 100 short video spots that show people having a moment with Alexa, the name of the Echo’s brain. These ads are genius because they are short and sweet, funny, and tackle the exhausting task of not only explaining what the Echo does, but explaining all the things an Echo can do. The videos were inspired by real customer stories and reviews – which is what makes this a truly engaging campaign. Amazon was smart to use its website’s reviews – one of the business’ most popular features and the subject of many hilarious blogs – to generate the content for these videos. The
The spots feature all kinds of different skills. One shows a man using a fire extinguisher and asking Alexa to use 1-800-FLOWERS to order his girlfriend or wife a bouquet. Another shows a man dressed up in a mascot costume unable to pick up his keys; he asks Alexa to order him an Uber.
Another spot features the new Echo Dot – released in September – and showcases the weather, calendar, and math skills of the device: a mother sees her child’s driveway chalk drawing and asks if it will rain tomorrow, a woman asks Alexa to add a birthday to her calendar, a woman is watching her child make a huge mess with a bowl of spaghetti and asks how many minutes are in 18 years
Yet another spot features the Amazon ordering, Dominoes, and dictionary skills: a man is using Band Aids to tape presents and asks Alexa to order tape, a budding child magician fails at pulling a tablecloth off the table without taking the food with it, and a man is checking how to spell a word that he already has tattooed on his back. Subsequently, that spot also hints at Alexa’s skill to tell you where nearby businesses are, as that guy needs a tattoo removal shop.
You can check out all of the #JustAsk videos on the Amazon YouTube page.
