
Spammy Google Home spouts audio ads without warning - m_eiman
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/16/google_home_audio_adverts/
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msabalau
I have a Home, and have bought three for family members. I find the random
insertion of an irrelevant ad to be shocking _because_ it is dumb and
annoying. This is very early days, and I'm really surprised that Google,
having been almost overly protective of monetization with Glass, and generally
a company I've found making advertising better and more relevant, could
misstep so badly as to shove irrelevant ads down the throats of paying
customers.

As short sighted and incompetent as this ad is from a product management
perspective, the glib, dishonest, and irrelevant p/r response is a whole
'nother realm of stupid. That hack should be fired immediately.

As @swiftonsecurity noted on twitter: "This is really just sad. There's a team
of amazing engineers somewhere, watching their own leadership destroy
collective dreams right now."

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username223
What did those "amazing engineers" dream about? Pumping even more ads into
people's homes (without a capital "H," i.e. places inhabited by humans)?

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gumby
This is a harbinger of the IoT future. I anticipate that your self-driving car
will realize you want to go to a restaurant (say, a fancy three star palace)
and will take a longer route past MacDonalds, interrupting your trip to offer
a discount coupon on a Big Mac.

Actually, I expect Uber will roll this feature out later this year.

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webaholic
It's one thing to place ads on a free service like google search, but to place
them in a product bought by paying money? I don't get it.

May be they should follow Amazon's lead and offer a product for a discount and
include ads only in that.

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geoffmcc
> Google's official response: This isn't an ad; the beauty in the Assistant is
> that it invites our partners to be our guest and share their tales.

Who at google thought the best way to phrase this was by using the one line,
even someone who doesn't have kids or normally watch Disney films associates
with the exact movie people are complaining the add is about.

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ocdtrekkie
The Google spokesperson's response is truly a classic too: "This isn’t an ad;
the beauty in the Assistant is that it invites our partners to be our guest
and share their tales."

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grasshopper12a
A few days ago on HN I've read a comment of someone explaining how one of the
first guys who created a PR agency called it PR because the word "propaganda"
sounded bad. This sounds about the same to me, the word "ad" is replaced with
"we involve partners".

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gumby
That was probably my comment and it was slightly different: the word
"propaganda" _was_ the original word for what we now call advertising
("propagate the message"). It was Goebbels becoming "Minister of Propaganda"
(yes, minister of advertising) that lead to the change.

Interestingly enough "the guy", Edward Bernays, was Freud's nephew, and he
literally wrote the book on the subject, entitled, yes, "Propaganda"

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uwu
the writer really has something against google

