Nevertheless, Amazon has similar integration opportunities and market advantages in audio as it has in other forms of entertainment. Audio content—including books, music playlists, and podcasts—is tightly woven into Amazon’s Echo smart speaker and Alexa voice assistant technologies and is also marketed through Amazon’s retail storefront.
The low penetration in China is not for a lack of interest in digital audio. Consumers in China have a swath of options in this regard—from ebooks, audio livestreaming, social audio to karaoke—that competes for ear time.
Author and advertising industry luminary Rishad Tobbacowala joins eMarketer co-founder and Insider Intelligence chief evangelist Geoff Ramsey to discuss the factors that led him to author his well-received book "Restoring the Soul of Business: Staying Human in the Age of Data," and the ways in which the volume prefigured the marketing challenges wrought by the pandemic.