Voice-enabled smart assistant, Alexa, is a daily part of the lives of millions of customers globally—with a particular life-changing impact on customers with disabilities. Around the world, Alexa helps customers accomplish things every day. For some customers, Alexa is so much more—a trusted companion, a way to connect with their loved ones, or even a tool to make their home more accessible.
According to the CDC, 1 in 4 adults in the United States have some type of disability, yet we fail to see these stories represented at that same frequency in marketing. Through the Alexa Stories campaign, we celebrate the incredible ways Alexa makes a difference in the lives of real customers with disabilities, with the goal of bringing underrepresented stories to the forefront.
Our aim was to build credibility with communities living with disabilities and own our commitment to broadening our relationships with them.
We created a storytelling program, Alexa Stories, for real customers to share their unique experiences with unscripted authenticity and candor. We produced a video series profiling life-changing stories of how people around the world experience every day with assistance from Alexa. This series gives customers the opportunity to tell their own powerful stories, creating community and connection through Alexa.
A simple but effective strategy:
Owned Media: Leveraged our massive Amazon.com and Alexa landing page as a platform to host the videos, detail the specific skills, tools, and features that contributed to each story, and serve to show the global level of impact Alexa has on consumers with disabilities. We also amplified these stories on-screen on Echo Show devices, our Alexa weekly newsletters, and Thursday Night Football on Prime Video.
Owned/Paid Social: Hosted our full series of Alexa Stories on the Alexa YouTube channel with cross-promotion on both Amazon and Alexa social channels, including TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Earned Media: To generate maximum coverage, we developed blogs on About Amazon to feature Alexa Stories and pitched stories to relevant local media, knowing we could leverage human interest and community reporting as the best opportunity for earned coverage.
As the New York Times put it, “for many people smart-home capabilities are a convenience or a luxury, but for those who live with accessibility challenges, the technology allows them to live a more independent and empowered life…Convenience for you is independence for me.” The result was a massive response to the narrative around the impact smart-home devices can have for consumers with disabilities.
Alexa Stories drove statistically significant lift in Alexa brand trust (+4%) and utility perceptions (+9%), increased purchase intent for Echo Devices (+7%), and outperformed all Advertising Benchmark Index (ABX) norms for creative breakthrough: brand recall (+30%), likeability (+23%), watchability (+21%), CTA (+19%), relevance (+14%), understood (+8%), reputation change (+22%). We delivered 1.5B impressions leveraging Amazon operated channels.
Across social media channels, the campaign drove over 12MM, 238k engagements, and an engagement rate of 15% (vs. 10% benchmark), and set record-breaking top-10 stats for the Alexa99 Instagram channel. Our consumers responded in droves - a testament to just how relevant these stories were. Below are just a few of the examples of some of the powerful messages of hope and celebration.
The Alexa Stories program isn’t just a portrayal of customers with disabilities in a singular ad, it is a core priority for the Alexa brand and our commitment towards accessibility for all.
