Thursday, April 13, 2017

Burger King Spams Google Home With New TV Commercial

There is a new spam game in town, those who try to trigger your Google Home device or Google Assistant to start talking to you. A new Burger King ad, as reported by The Verge aimed at triggering Google Home devices to start talking to you about their Whopper burger. The ad said "OK Google, what is the Whopper burger?"

Google disabled this question from triggering an answer on Google devices within 3 hours of the commercial airing.

Here is the ad:

There are many podcasts and radio shows that simply will not say the trigger words for Google Home, Alexa and Siri. They try hard not to set off devices and here you have Burger King specifically trying to do just that on national TV. It is a pretty sleazy kind of thing to do but I doubt they thought it was sleazy, they probably thought it was clever.

I would definitely classify this as some sort of spam technique that will eventually be added to Google's guidelines somewhere.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.


Source: Search Engine Roundtable