Dive Brief:
- MillerCoors and IPG Media Lab have partnered with Drizly, an on-demand beer delivery service, to create the Miller Lite On-Demand program which allows consumers to use connected devices to order beer from home per Media Post.
- The service provided 500 customers with Amazon Dash buttons and developed an Alexa skill around the phrase “Start Miller Time” which brings the program to any Alexa-powered device such as Echo, Dot and the Amazon app on smartphones.
- “As more and more purchases shift to e-commerce and on-demand services, ‘at shelf’ is increasingly the shelf in a refrigerator or cupboard and ‘on-premise’ is increasingly a couch,” Jorie Sax, associate marketing manager of MillerCoors’ Digital Incubator initiative, told IoT Daily. The On-Demand program is part of the incubator initiative.
Dive Insight:
Brands are still feeling their way around how to handle home digital assistants like Amazon’s Alexa-powered devices and with the Internet-of-Things space overall. Many marketers are looking forward to a potential data bonanza these devices are certainly creating, even if that data isn’t really being shared with marketers just yet.
Efforts like the Miller Lite On-Demand program take the challenge head-on by going directly to sales, lumping in marketing and data along the way. Amazon Dash buttons are popular for a wide variety of household items, and while Alexa skills continue to grow, something as useful as ordering beer and having it delivered could give marketers of other products working ideas.
Amazon’s technology was chosen for the program because of its reach in consumer’s homes, according to the team. As such, the partnership underscores one of Amazon's competitive advantages in the digital assistant space where Google, Apple and others are also competing, namely the company's e-commerce heritage. Alexa's ability to Streamline the digital shopping experience via voice commands is one reason for its early success. Other platforms will need to catch up here, something Google is currently trying to do.
