For some it’s just too futuristic.
But for many, smart speakers like Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa and Apple Siri, provide vital support to help navigate and manage everyday tasks.
It’s a competitive space with some pretty enormous players including Amazon Alexa, which has sold over 100m devices and Google Assistant, which was recently revealed to have over 500 million users a month.
Going up against Amazon’s Alexa, Google is known to go to great creative lengths at CES to mark its position in the growing smart speaker market. Remember last year, Google’s own version of ‘It’s a Small World’?.
While not as elaborate, this year, Google created another immersive brand activation for the conference attendees in Las Vegas; an elaborate escape experience in a giant two-story fun house.
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Designed to showcase the abilities of the Google Assistant, visitors had to work harmoniously with the technology in order to complete a set of challenges.
This was the premise: “You will be meeting investors for dinner and they want you to serve them a specific dish: bacon and Brussels burrata di bufala risotto burritos. You spend your day using Google Assistant to help you navigate to the market, preheat the oven and play music for dinner”.
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The fun and interactive experiential activation then put the visitors through the different everyday tasks to complete the challenge like driving to a supermarket to buy the ingredients and using Google Assistant to convert grams to ounces. Each task was carefully and cleverly crafted to showcase the key technological features and force the participants to embrace the help of Assistant.
While greatly downscaled from last year’s extravagant theme park ride, there is no doubt that the search giant effectively immersed participants into the world of Google Assistant and had a strong brand presence at the busy event.
To further boost brand awareness, the search giant also plastered the trademark phrase ‘Hey Google’ onto the Las Vegas monorail.
Challenging and highly entertaining, Escape Rooms offer a great interactive platform for brands to engage with consumers. Our favourites include the Escape Room on a train and the Escape Kitchen, which put a fascinating twist on a cookery show.