Universal Information Services

With the ushering in of the new year comes the Consumer Technology Association’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES), and with that comes all of the new cool tech toys. From LG’s credit card thing, a bending 4K TV, and now Honda’s self balancing motorcycle. Now as much as I would love to rave over how cool a self-driving car is with a 0-60 2.39 sec, that can beat out most super and hyper cars on the market, there is much more to discuss. Instead lets dive into the future of Smart Home technology, and more specifically how this technology may expand the public relations of share of voice.

As of pre-CES the Amazon Echo and Amazon dot were the only big names in smart home technology. Echo and Dot give you the ability to buy amazon products, turn the lights on and off, as well as many other useful at home tools. One thing Alexa, what Amazon calls the voice of the Echo and Dot, can do is read you major news updates. Updates on the weather or breaking news, it is a brand new way for people to hear what is going on and what some people have to say. As we transition to more and more sophisticated technology, monitoring paid, earned or shared media through social media tracking and broadcast monitoring expands. Eventually print will disappear all together. Or will it? Having Alexa read you the local or national news you’ve asked for may be the next licensing opportunity for the struggling newspaper industry.

So the potentially multi-million dollar question is how will my generation track this media being to delivered through smart home technology? Additionally, how can we possibly make money tracking that content. It’s not going to be the easiest solution since you can’t record this type of media like you can broadcast content. But I predict that before I graduate in 2020 the providers of Echo, Dot, and other similar devices will be indexing all of the content requests and content provided, helping companies like Universal measure that new share of voice even if it all sounds like Alexa.

This has been Teddy Murphy and I’m keeping my eye on what’s next.