The viral Super Bowl commercial – Alexa loses her voice

Hi guys! Welcome back to my blog. I’m doing a blog on Week 10’s Topic of Viral Marketing.

Leading the smart speaker market at the moment, the Amazon Echo is a spectacular innovation that lets you communicate with virtual assistant Alexa to do a range of different actions.

Basically, Amazon Alexa can answer you a large degree of questions, set up dates on calendars or even play music. If you have smart appliances in your home, the assistant can further be ugraded to perform a range of different actions with those appliances. Now how awesome is that?

But we are here to talk digital marketing! And one of the most unique and creative marketing campaigns of 2018 is “Alexa Loses Her Voice.”

Now, while the digital marketers in us do see how the content of this Super Bowl ad could be strategized in a far better way on social media alone. Yet, Amazon decided to spend a few million and go for a big publicity stunt as a viral advertisement during the Super Bowl.

Watch on YoutubeThe advertisement itself is extremely creative and quickly became one of the most talked about commercials from the Super Bowl. It presents the idea that “Alexa lost her voice” and the echo smart functions would instead be replaced by famous celebrity voices.

Part of the marketing strategy is the distinct selection of the celebrities chosen to be featured in the ad. They decided to feature some infamous faces, such as Cardi B, Gordon Ramsay and Sir Anthony Hopkins. And while most celebrities do have their own brand, the celebrities in questions are infamous for their powerful characters.

Now, let’s look at the table below describing different groups social media viral marketing campaigns. There are four in total:

1. Strokes of Luck
2. Triumphs
3. Nightmares
4. Homemade Issues

Which category do you think “Alexa loses her voice” falls into?

Yup! It’s definitely a Triumph! Since it was a campaign produced solely by Amazon, “The initiator of viral campaign” was from the “Company”. And since it topped USA Today’s Ad Meter as audience’s favorite commercial and reached up to 48 million views on youtube now, we can definitely say that the “Outcome” was POSITIVE.

The reason for this success of this campaign is not only on how brilliant the video was, it is also thanks to online word-of-mouth; the sharing of information between a customer and a colleage/friend/family member or so on. Since the advertisement was released on various social media platforms, the customers were allowed to share the ad with people and then ended up becoming “viral”.

What are your thoughts? Share them with me in the comments below!