Spammy Google Home spouts audio ads without warning | Hacker News Reader

Spammy Google Home spouts audio ads without warning

theregister.co.uk

46 pointsm_eiman10 comments

I have a Home, and have bought three for family members. I find the random insertion of an irrelevant ad to be shocking because it is dumb and annoying. This is very early days, and I'm really surprised that Google, having been almost overly protective of monetization with Glass, and generally a company I've found making advertising better and more relevant, could misstep so badly as to shove irrelevant ads down the throats of paying customers.

As short sighted and incompetent as this ad is from a product management perspective, the glib, dishonest, and irrelevant p/r response is a whole 'nother realm of stupid. That hack should be fired immediately.

As @swiftonsecurity noted on twitter: "This is really just sad. There's a team of amazing engineers somewhere, watching their own leadership destroy collective dreams right now."

What did those "amazing engineers" dream about? Pumping even more ads into people's homes (without a capital "H," i.e. places inhabited by humans)?

This is a harbinger of the IoT future. I anticipate that your self-driving car will realize you want to go to a restaurant (say, a fancy three star palace) and will take a longer route past MacDonalds, interrupting your trip to offer a discount coupon on a Big Mac.

Actually, I expect Uber will roll this feature out later this year.

It's one thing to place ads on a free service like google search, but to place them in a product bought by paying money? I don't get it.

May be they should follow Amazon's lead and offer a product for a discount and include ads only in that.

> Google's official response: This isn't an ad; the beauty in the Assistant is that it invites our partners to be our guest and share their tales.

Who at google thought the best way to phrase this was by using the one line, even someone who doesn't have kids or normally watch Disney films associates with the exact movie people are complaining the add is about.

The Google spokesperson's response is truly a classic too: "This isn’t an ad; the beauty in the Assistant is that it invites our partners to be our guest and share their tales."

A few days ago on HN I've read a comment of someone explaining how one of the first guys who created a PR agency called it PR because the word "propaganda" sounded bad. This sounds about the same to me, the word "ad" is replaced with "we involve partners".

That was probably my comment and it was slightly different: the word "propaganda" was the original word for what we now call advertising ("propagate the message"). It was Goebbels becoming "Minister of Propaganda" (yes, minister of advertising) that lead to the change.

Interestingly enough "the guy", Edward Bernays, was Freud's nephew, and he literally wrote the book on the subject, entitled, yes, "Propaganda"

There's that, but there's also the fact that they invoke a musical number from the movie at the same time ("Be Our Guest") making this response in itself a bit of an ad.

the writer really has something against google

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