Linked – Google Home is playing audio ads for Beauty and the Beast
Fact – Google is an advertising company first and foremost.
Fact – When you decide to use a Google product, it will track everything it knows about you in an effort to “provide useful information” to you, whether it is actually a paid ad or not, and you may not know the difference. That’s kind of why I haven’t really been interested in Google Assistant.
“When contacted by The Verge for more information, Google denied that the audio snippet was actually an ad, initially providing this rather strange statement: “This isn’t an ad; the beauty in the Assistant is that it invites our partners to be our guest and share their tales.” That appeared to describe… an advertisement. Using Beauty and the Beast references.
Later on Thursday, Google sent a follow-up statement with a more thorough explanation:
This wasn’t intended to be an ad. What’s circulating online was a part of our My Day feature, where after providing helpful information about your day, we sometimes call out timely content. We’re continuing to experiment with new ways to surface unique content for users and we could have done better in this case.”
