A Brief History of Waze's Celebrity Voice Prompts
How turn-by-turn navigation became more fun
I have a soft spot for The Fast and Furious franchise. Admittingly, it’s been a while since I have seen one of the films. But the long running franchise —its 10th installment was announced during last week’s Super Bowl—inspired Waze’s celebrity voice prompts.
Over the years, celebrities like Stephen Colbert, Rob Gronkowski, Arnold Schwarzenegger, T-Pain, and Christina Aguilera have lent their voice to the popular app, providing turn-by-turn directions to drivers around the world.
It’s hard to believe the feature is more than ten years old now. Originally, custom voice prompts where supposed to launch with Fast & Furious 6. But a few twists and turns changed the timelines.
Here’s what happened.
I worked at Waze from April 2012 until July 2018. I am by no means the longest tenured Wazer, much less the most relevant or important. But I did work at the company before it was acquired by Google and I was there through some important milestones: The launch of the competing Apple Maps, Tim Cook’s Waze recommendation, the launch of Waze Ads and the expansion of the ads platform into new markets.
In late 2012, Waze was still an independent company and monetization was top of mind for our leadership. There were ten of us in the US office, based in Palo Alto. All of us supported the ad platform in one way or another. It was all hands on deck for the impending launch of the Ads Platform, which would roll out in November of that year.
The premise of Waze Ads was that brands— and eventually small-and-medium sized businesses—with physical locations could advertise on the app.
We had three main ad units:
Branded pin: marked a physical location
Zero-speed-takeover: digital billboard that popped up when a user was stopped near the location of an advertiser,
nearby arrow: more direct version of the takeover and once clicked, rerouted the user to the business.
Our hypothesis was that organic, driver-friendly brands with hundreds of physical locations would benefit from the platform. Think of restaurants, gas stations, banks, and big box retail brands. People were already using the app to navigate to these locations, so it seemed natural for these brands to take the next logical step and mark their presence in the Waze ecosystem. As such, launch partners included Dunkin Donuts, gas station Kum and Go, Ramada Hotels, and Jamba Juice, to name a few.
Several of our launch partners would renew with us. But we were having trouble gaining traction with other brands in the quick-service-restaurant, retail, and fuel categories. The hype for Waze Ads was certainly there. Everyone knew what Waze was. Yet for how popular the app was, advertisers from our target lists were hesitant to commit dollars.
Was it our sales pitch? Was it that it was a new and untested platform? Was it the season?
It was some mix of the three. But the most significant reason advertisers were slow to adopt Waze was because of how these businesses were structured. McDonalds. Chevron. Shell. These were the perfect brands for Waze yet their franchise structure made it impossible to build consensus. I recall a gas station executive telling me, “We love the app. But it would take forever to convince all our franchisees to commit dollars.”
We heard this from fast food restaurants as well. Banking was another story. They didn’t have the herding cats problem; they just weren’t convinced they needed to pin their ATMs or their branch locations on the app,even as a customer service investment. Oh well. On to the next one. That’s not to say we were shut out. I ended the year booking more than six figures in sales and my early success was a massive boon to my career. Yet despite the reception and positive feedback of Waze Ads, it became evident that we’d have to spend time developing other verticals.
One nondescript afternoon towards the end of 2012, my coworker Mark and I were chatting over a few liters of diet soda. Mark was in charge of data and insights. I told him I had a date that weekend to see the new Jack Reacher movie. Out of curiosity, I asked him how many people were using Waze to navigate to movie theaters. Piqued by the question, he ran a quick query.
Moments later, he said that the volume of “theater” searches was quite low. We sat there a bit longer, mulling over the fact that this just didn’t make a lot of sense and ran counter to personal experience and even expectation. People love the movies. I don’t know who suggested it first, but Mark then ran a query search for not just “theater” but every synonym and misspelling we could think of. By the end of the exercise, our keyword search, when bucketed together was actually quite significant. It told us that movie theater searches were in the Top 5 searches within Waze. It also told us people are creative spellers.
This was an opportunity to pitch Waze Ads to Hollywood. Almost immediately, I started reaching out to studios and when necessary, their advertising agencies. I had no connections and no history in the business. But everyone in Los Angeles knew what Waze was. It was a part of their daily drive. I’m sure my poetic and convincing emails sparked their interest. But the “@waze.com” domain certainly didn’t hurt. I started bouncing back and forth between the Bay and LA. Word to The Grouch and Murs.
My pitch to studio execs was simple: why compete with every other studio for billboard space when you can be one of the first on Waze? Less competition, more eyeballs! I think I used “Blue Ocean” a few times in my sales speech. I believed it in my bones that Waze Ads was going to give them valuable attention for their dollars. They were interested, but a common refrain I heard was, “this is great, but not very exciting. What else can Waze do?” Studios like that “new, new.” If there is one thing I learned from my time building the entertainment vertical on Waze was that movie studios want to do first in kind. They don't JUST want to do what everyone else is doing, even brands in other verticals.
During a brainstorming session in LA with one studio, I floated the idea that perhaps they could get their talent to record the voice prompts and guide Waze users during their daily drive. Not only would it be fun for the driver, but it would be a creative and unique way for the studio to promote an upcoming release.
Now, I may have suggested custom voice prompts to the studios. However, recording custom prompts wasn’t necessarily my idea. Waze already had a litany of custom voices for users to pick from. Some, like the “Israeli Sergeant” were recorded by employees. It was all in the spirit of making one’s commute enjoyable. So it wasn’t a big leap to suggest celebrities do the same. The concept was always there. I was just the person who wrapped it up in a sales pitch.
Still, despite the excitement from advertisers and from Waze, there was an ongoing debate about HOW we should do it. The main consideration was: could this voice prompt product scale? The functionality for custom voices already existed. So from an engineering POV, the additional lift would be minimal. Still, we had to work through questions like:
how do we package it?
How do we price it?
What’s the tradeoff between creativity and utility?
It wasn’t as obvious then that we absolutely HAD to do it.
Luckily Waze was small —only 10 of us in the Palo Alto office — and we could iterate quickly. We decided the voice prompts could not be purchased by themselves. They had to be a part of a broader ad buy. If you wanted the voices, then you had to buy the pins and takeovers as well. We believed in location-based advertising. And the incipient ad units—the pins, takeovers, and arrows—were our bread and butter. There was an additional concern from leadership that if we sold the voices as a standalone unit, it would diminish the appeal of our ad platform. Furthermore, we didn’t want to set the precedent that we would sell whatever advertisers wanted. It would make scaling nearly impossible.
With the pricing framework in place, I went back to Los Angeles. Universal Pictures was the most interested. “This could be great for FF6. Vin and Paul would love this,” I recall a Universal exec saying. Back in Palo Alto, the team was just as excited. No one had been a bigger supporter of the idea than Noam, our CEO, yet no one pushed us harder to think in terms of scale and resource allocation. He didn’t want to leave anything to chance. Growing an advertising product is one thing, but it can’t take priority over driver safety and functionality.
Noam’s biggest concern was that brands would err on the side of creativity, eschewing utility. Imagine for example that you have a left turn up ahead onto Sepulveda. But instead of hearing a “turn left” command, you heard something like, Good news everyone! A new season of Futura…oh, you had to turn left 1000 feet ago.
Utility had to come first. That wasn’t to say that Noam didn't want talent to be creative or the product to be fun. One nondescript afternoon, he told me and another coworker, “go watch the last Furious movie and come up with 20-30 examples of memorable lines that Paul and the others could record. Give Universal an idea of how we envision the prompts.”
My coworker and I literally spent an afternoon watching one of the Fast movies, scribbling lines and rewinding when we had to. It was one of those surreal, “is this really my job right now” sort of moments that wouldn’t make sense outside of Hollywood or Silicon Valley. The point of the exercise was to show examples and to build out what I would later learn is referred to as a “Go-to-Market” plan.
I was still negotiating with Universal. The size of the deal was important but I was more interested in the type of deal we were doing: a fun, first in kind deal that would make driving just a bit more enjoyable and one that I imagined would have other studios knocking on our door. Unfortunately, Universal told us that scheduling conflicts with FF6 talent would prevent them from recording the prompts. They still promoted the movie on Waze, but we were disappointed that we couldn't get the voice commands off the ground. A few months later I got an email from my contacts at Universal asking me if I’d heard of Kevin Hart.
“He’s starring in a new movie…you may have heard…called Ride Along. It’s coming out next year. We think it could be a great fit. When are you in LA next?”
I had no plans to be in LA soon. I picked a random date the following week. I would figure out the details later.
It’s been almost ten years since Waze joined Google. As good a time as any to reflect on lessons and failures. More to come.
Hi Eric! Dying to read the rest of the story. What happened? Thx!