"In October 2020, 48.5% of U.S. adults reported having at least one smart home device that was not a smart speaker. This compares to a smart speaker adoption rate of 34.7%. More than 55% of U.S. adults have either a smart home device or a smart speaker." Source: Smart Home Ownership Nearing 50% of U.S. Adults with Voice Assistant Control Becoming More Popular - New Research - Voicebot.ai
"Of those consumers who own a smart speaker, 51% remember having heard an ad on it — up from 25% in May 2019. About 85% say they hear these ads at least weekly, according to data released Friday." Source: Lockdown Gets Consumers Talking, Listening To Ads On Smart Speakers: Adobe 09/18/2020 (mediapost.com)
"Webs could be a new source for musical inspiration that is very different from the usual human experience..." Source: Making music with spiders webs and talking arachnid: discover more at ACS Spring 2021 | Laboratory News (labnews.co.uk)
"Brands are thinking about the evolution of technology and sound in their marketing, over the last two years, our team, which focuses on sonic branding, spoke to more than 100 senior marketers around the world. A clear consensus emerged that the next decade will be framed by a duality in visual and audio brand strategy and investment." Source: Progressive Marketers Increasingly Hear Their Brands As Well As See Them (forbes.com)
"The consumption of audio and voice-first content is booming right now. Currently, there are over 18.5 million episodes of podcasts available, and those numbers are climbing daily. We recommend making use of these spaces right now." Source: Voice-Driven Shopping Experiences On The Rise | Retail Dive
"Currently, there are over 18.5 million episodes of podcasts available, and those numbers are climbing daily. Stats show that the abrupt shift to quarantine and social distancing measures in 2020 accelerated the rise of e-commerce by about five years. Statista predicts the worldwide revenue of Digital Advertising of USD 333.8 billion in 2019 is expected to grow to USD 491.1 billion up to 2025, with a leading share of video advertising." Source: The Era Of Voice Branding: Customer Connections In 2021 Are Strengthened Through the Spoken Word (prnewswire.com)
"Natural Language Understanding (NLU) is being used in more and more applications, powering the world’s chatbots, voicebots and voice assistants. With 67% of companiesclaiming to be working on conversational assistants, and 51% of companies forecast to spend more on conversational AI than on mobile apps, it’s likely only a matter of time before you and your team encounter working with NLU systems." Source: What is Natural Language Understanding (NLU) • VUX World
"An estimated 41% of the American population over the age of 12 listens in, and this year annual advertising revenues are expected to top $1 billion in the US for the first time." Source: Apple, Spotify Unveil New Podcast Subscription Products (morningbrew.com)
"During four to five months time, infants expand their repertoire of vocalic utterances to include new components that interact with the overall melodic contour, namely vowel- and consonant-like elements. the infant begins to intentionally imitate intonation patterns of the surrounding language(s) in consonant-vowel syllable sequences in babbling." Source: From melody to language - Universität Würzburg (uni-wuerzburg.de)
"More than 170 million people are already connected to hundreds of thousands of podcast pages on Facebook, and more than 35 million people are members of fan groups around podcasts — but until now, you had to leave the Facebook app to listen to these episodes." Source: Be Heard: Bringing Social Audio Experiences to Facebook - About Facebook (fb.com)
"IHOP's promotion for its premium bacon includes a quirky experiment with Clubhouse, which mostly hosts audio-only discussion rooms that let people drop in on live conversations. The restaurant chain's sensory experience on Clubhouse comes as more brands test the invite-only app in their promotions. While the app is still officially in testing, it expanded its user base from 600,000 in December to 2 million the following month." Source: IHOP serves sizzling bacon sounds on Clubhouse in new menu item's rollout | Marketing Dive
"As of February 2018, smart speaker ownership was almost equivalent in homes with the youngest (18-to-24-year-olds) and oldest (65+) adult segments. We are already seeing solid growth in the number of households with multiple smart speakers, from 20 percent in June 2017 to 30 percent in February 2018. In fact , 10.5 percent of households had three or more of these devices in February 2018." Source: Smart Speaker Penetration Hits 20% of U.S. Wi-Fi Households -... (comscore.com)
"Mary Meeker’s annual internet trends report shows that 20% of mobile searches were made using voice in 2016, a number that continues to rise as technology companies refine and improve their digital assistants. ComScore projecting that 50% of all searches will be voice searches by 2020." Source: Optimizing For Voice Search Is More Important Than Ever (forbes.com)
"There will be 21.4 million smart speakers in the US by 2020. Nearly 50% of people are now using voice search when researching products. High consumer usage of voice assistants in autos (51%) and household (39%) indicates increased comfort with the technology” – according to Activate via WSJ. Google’s AI has been reading nearly 3,000 romance novels in order to improve its conversational search abilities." Source: Voice Search - Growth statistics & how trends in voice search affect SEO (edit.co.uk)
"Roughly 65 percent of people who own an Amazon Echo or Google Home can’t imagine to going back to the days before they had a smart speaker, and 42 percent of that group say the voice-activated devices have quickly become “essential” to their lives." Source: How Voice-Activation Is Becoming The New 'Touch' | (geomarketing.com)
"Purchases made through devices such as Google Home and Amazon's Echo are projected to leap from $2 billion to $40 billion by 2022 as technology improves. Smart home product sales are expected to total $4.5 billion this year, up 34% from 2017, according to the Consumer Technology Association. Among the U.S. residents who have a smart speaker, 62% have used it to buy groceries or some other item, according to OC&C's study. The report predicts that the percentage of U.S. homes with a smart speaker will rise to 55% by 2022. Among those who do shop via voice, 83% say they have confidence in the virtual assistant's suggestions. Source: Sales via Amazon's Alexa, Google Home and other speakers set to soar (usatoday.com)
"59 percent on US teens and 36 percent of adults use voice search while watching TV and 22 percent of teens admit to using it while in the bathroom. The study, based on results obtained by 1,400 US residents, showed that 55 percent of teens use some kind of hands-free search on their smartphones every day, such as Google's own solution, along with Apple's Siri and Microsoft's Cortana." Source: Google study: over half of teenagers use voice search daily | Android Central
"Consumers are already primed to interact with voice-enabled ads — 38.5% of the US population uses a voice assistant at least monthly. 72% of Pandora voice-activated ad listeners described the ads as easy to use. 47% said they either liked or loved the ability to use their voice to interact with ads. Adtech company Instreamatic observed that 38% of consumers have found voice ads to be less intrusive than traditional ads, and 39% believe the ads are more engaging. 52% of smart speaker owners are controlling their TVs with voice commands, illustrating that customers are getting comfortable delegating tasks to voice assistants." Source: The Interactive Voice Ad Opportunity - Rain
"According to The CMO Survey, social media spending accounted for about 23% of marketing budgets in June 2020 — a 74% increase from February. This investment resulted in a 24% performance boost for those companies. With more than 2.7 billion active users, Facebook is the largest social media platform in the world. About 500 million people use Facebook Stories each day, so try adding distinct audio elements to your next video collection. To give users more contextual interactions, Twitter created voice tweets: short snippets of sound that serve as an audio version of the platform’s signature posts." Source: Sonic Branding Tips for the 4 Major Social Media Platforms - Business 2 Community
"Some 71% of Americans said they began playing video games more after the pandemic began, with more than one in three turning to classic video games from their childhood." Source: (More) digital trends for 2021: Making the new old again - Insider Intelligence Trends, Forecasts & Statistics (emarketer.com)
"Only 17% of respondents to IAB Australia’s annual survey indicated that they always tailor their creative to suit the specific audio channel." Source: The value of sonic branding is going unheard (mumbrella.com.au)
"At the Transform Awards Middle East and Africa, the new audio brand took home a silver in the ‘Best use of audio branding’ category. Judges loved the approach to using ambient sound to form the audio brand while also staying true to the authentic character of the RTA." Source: Transform magazine: Transporting sound - 2021 - Articles
"70% of searches on Google Assistant use “natural” language – Google. In UK, 62% of voice-enabled speaker owners have bought items via voice commerce, according to Invespcro.com. In 2019, 65% of adults had used voice search through smart speakers at least once a day. And also, we have that Voice shopping in the UK to be worth £3.5bn by 2022 (occstrategy.com). Further, OC&C estimates that $5bn will be spent through voice commerce by 2022 in the UK, representing 3% of online spending. Among people in the age group of 18 to 64 years, 32% use voice search and 52% of them make use of voice search while driving a car." Source: Voice commerce growth trends and statistics for the year 2020 (ziffity.com)
"Founded in 2015, Brain.fm now has more than 5,000 hours of music available, in three basic genres and 36 subgenres. The Focus genre, with subdivisions like Atmospheric, Drone, and Cinematic, is the prime choice for 90 percent of customers. Headphones or earbuds are highly recommended because of the spatial quality — call it audio 3-D — in which listeners absorb the sound. Brain.fm has 150,000-plus subscribers, about 20 percent of which are businesses, including some Fortune 500 companies, that offer Brain.fm as a perk to employees. It’s not whistle while you work, exactly; more like, plug in while you work." Source: Can ambient music make you more productive? This company thinks so. - Experience Magazine (expmag.com)
"eMarketer report an expected 4.8% increase in the US compared to 2020 while, in the UK, research shows a boost in audio streaming and radio listening during the pandemic." Source: Against expectations, digital audio continues to grow - Vixen Labs
"These findings were consistent with the limited previous research, which indicated that the playing of background classical music led to (a) people reporting that they were prepared to spend more and (b) higher actual spending. The results indicate that restaurant managers can use classical music to increase customer spending." Source: The Effect of Musical Style on Restaurant Customers' Spending - Adrian C. North, Amber Shilcock, David J. Hargreaves, 2003 (sagepub.com)
"Research carried out at the University of Leicester in the UK discovered that brands that use music that is aligned with its identity are 96% more likely to be remembered by the consumer, versus brands that use ‘unfit’ music or no music at all." Source: Want to stand out? Pay attention to your 'sonic logo' in 2021 (thenextweb.com)
"To bring the science to life, Pandora has used it to inform the curation of seven color matched playlists, based on the seven colors of the visible spectrum: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. You’ll hear (and see) a difference between the music associated with brighter colors like red and yellow, and darker colors like blue and indigo. Some play with the nuance of sonic colors, such as orange being more relaxed in tempo than red and yellow." Source: Applying the Science of Sound and Color to Your Brand Experience (adweek.com)
"The Vinyl platform is open for business, offering information on an array of songs and artists, including the 500,000 on Songtradr’s own roster, and the ability for brand’s to dive deeper into music solutions. To help smooth the process, music licensing marketplace Songtradr is launching a brand solutions division to help advertisers and agencies develop and iterate holistic solutions ranging from branded content and sync placements to sonic branding, artist partnerships and live-streaming." Source: Licensing Platform Songtradr Expands To Help Brands Get In Tune With Music Solutions (forbes.com)
"While music is the biggest part of Shell’s sound strategy, the company is looking ahead—specifically to voice activations and non-musical soundscape. “We won’t ever have a single human voice which represents the Shell brand, but we may have a suite of voices, as brands are increasingly experienced by a voice—Alexa, or the way voice activates in the car—we need to define what we want the voices of shell to sound like,” Keate says." Source: How Shell Is Winning At The Sonic Branding Game (forbes.com)