Digital Assistants - Why are they Worth over $12 billion?

There is a new paid ad opportunity that is emerging and it has to do with your digital assistant friends, Siri, Google Now, Alexa and Cortana. So what, (or who) is a digital assistant? A digital assistant, also called a virtual assistant, is an application program that can understand natural language and complete electronic tasks for the end user. 

We know these digital assistants to live in devices like our PCs, and smartphones, but with the way technology is moving they will soon be found in many home and automotive devices in the future. (I can’t wait to just tell my laundry to do itself – “Hey Washer, wash my clothes please.”) With these developments that are sure to happen in the future, there are many new spaces and opportunities for human computer interaction. 

A new study by Juniper, (Digital Voice Assistants: Platforms, Revenues & Opportunities 2016-2021) forecasts that over $12Bn of ad spend per annum will be made through this rapidly growing medium by 2021, an increase of over 3,000% on estimated spend for 2016. 

So what does this mean for ad spend? What does this mean for paid search?

Money – and limitless opportunity. There is a huge opportunity for an incredibly granular level of targeting and an enormous trough of “inbound” and unobtrusive data collection from users.

Advertisers and companies need to start thinking about paid search differently. It begs the question - will paid search really be “on mobile” anymore? It seems like this shift will mean that we need to start considering paid search from a platform perspective. We need to start thinking about which “environment” has the best bandwidth and coverage for the kinds of products or services that a company sells. How will we know this? By studying the computing habits of several of our potential clients across multiple devices. 

“Voice Paid Search” is the future, and it’s starting now.