My friend Dana spent all of Monday texting me photos from Las Vegas, one every twenty minutes, like a hostage proving the date. A monorail car wrapped end to end. A billboard the size of a parking garage. A white booth with a slide in it, sitting outside the convention center in the rain, which apparently happens in Las Vegas. Every single photo said the same two words. Hey Google.
Two words. That is what all of it was for.
A year ago that same city belonged to Amazon. Alexa was in refrigerators, in cars, in lamps and thermostats and one memorable bathroom mirror. Amazon did not need a booth of its own, because it had hundreds of partners doing the work for it. Google watched that happen, went home, and came back with a checkbook and a city.
Google is not selling a speaker at CES. It is buying the phrase you will say out loud in your own kitchen, and in a voice interface the wake word is the entire shelf.
Think about what disappears when the screen does. No packaging. No logo. No endcap, no aisle, no shelf position, no color you spent twenty years training people to recognize. What is left is a spoken phrase and whatever the assistant says back.
And whatever it decides to say back is a distribution question, not a search question. If a person asks for razors and gets one answer instead of a shelf of twelve, that is not a result. That is a buyer, making a purchase decision on your behalf, in your customer's kitchen, for free.
So the two words matter more than they look. Alexa is a name, and names are warm and easy and only slightly strange to say in an empty room. Hey Google is not a name. It is the company, spoken aloud, several times a day, by people who already use the verb without noticing they are doing it. That is the trick the search box pulled fifteen years ago, run again with a microphone.
The part that should interest anyone doing brand work is that neither company is really fighting over features. They are fighting over which sound a person makes reflexively. Habit is the most durable position there is, and it is very hard to take back once it sets.
They are fighting over which sound a person makes reflexively.
Brilliant or terrifying depends on where you sit. If you make a mid-tier brand of anything, and your customer eventually stops looking at a shelf, then Dana's photos are not trade show coverage. They are a weather report, and you should read them that way.
I ordered coffee at Ovation this morning by pointing at a pastry and grunting, which is honestly the interface I prefer. The barista knew exactly what I meant. Nobody had to buy a monorail.