The online marketplace has gone ahead and decided to ban advertisements in other parts of its mobile digital assistant.
New rules are in place for Amazon Alexa ads which have now been banned except in music, radio and flash briefings. The company has altered its Alexa Skills Kit policies. The changes were made quietly but made a notable difference to the way advertisements can run with Alexa as they have been primarily banned.
The new bans on mobile marketing with the Alexa app had noticeably fewer bans on ads.
The previous version of the Amazon Alexa ads policy said that the only ban in place had to do with the digital assistant’s home cards. Those appear within the Amazon Alexa mobile app. Another ban was in place for the digital assistant’s voice in terms of its use for mobile advertising.
This new version of the policy held onto the original bans but Amazon expanded the bans so it would involve “any advertising for third-party products or services, except in streaming music, streaming radio or flash briefing skills where ads are not the core functionality of the skill.”
The reason for the Amazon Alexa ads policy has yet to be known but it may be tech based.
Some reports suggest that Amazon may have changed their mobile marketing and advertising policy for Alexa due to the VoiceLabs-made technology which allows for sponsored messages to be inserted into many of the digital assistant’s skills.
Further speculation suggests that Amazon may have banned the mobile ads from many of the personal assistant’s layers as a result of controversy faced by Google. Recently, the search engine giant faced widespread backlash as a result of an ad for the Beauty and the Beast film, which played during the Google Home device’s daily briefings. The ad was placed by Google, not from its skills developers.
Google’s struggles were only worsened when Google Home devices were hijacked by a Burger King ad, which caused the gadgets to read the Whopper burger Wikipedia page.
So far, those are the leading hypotheses regarding the driving force behind the changes to the Amazon Alexa ads policy. It is easy to believe that the company is trying to shield itself from the type of criticism faced by one of its leading rivals.
