Kudos to WSJ’s Christopher Mims and his recent article (in which he claims to have coined a phrase that, even if its been around for at least 15 years, will undoubtedly now become ubiquitous across the corporate advertising and brand marketing universe in less time than it might take to craft a wily tweet.
First, in due respect to Christopher–if you’re reading this, you’d want to open a browser and insert the phrase “chatvertising” before you endeavor to secure a trademark or a patent. I found this definition posted to web in 2000:
The act of promoting a company, etc., by insinuating its name and/or press-release-like statements into casual online chats, discussion-groups, nodes, and the like. My employer, Immortals Inc., after a recent merger with MegaSuperCorp, announced Friday it will be launching a multi-billion-dollar chatvertising PR campaign.
But, lets not split hairs when it comes to PR industry IP; the most recent reference by WSJ’s Mims is profiling a more contemporary application: the one in which instant message communication between brand advocates and customers is actually taking place between brand-hosted “bots” (for you “newbies”, bots are merely software-contrived creatures from the world of artificial intelligence) and customers or brand fans who like to think they are engaging in a conversation with a real person. Or maybe, those who use applications such as Kik (akin to the currently more popular “WhatsApp”) are finding the computer-driven dialogue more comforting than having to communicate with a human. When considering the decline of customer service that has permeated online and brick and mortar companies, who can blame anyone for preferring to exchange dialogue with a robot?
Here’s an excerpt from Mims’ column in the WSJ (my footnotes follow accordingly):
“…Simply spamming users with ads in such an intimate space won’t work. Part of the problem is that until now, it hasn’t been clear what a “native” advertisement in a chat app looks like. Yet in the first week of offering its “promoted” chats, 1.5 million people opted in to one of the campaigns, according to a Kik representative. And Kik’s own chat bot, which began as an experiment and has been running for years, gets 1.8 million messages a day.
If it seems improbable that so many teens—80% of Kik’s users are under 22—would want to talk to a robot, consider what the creator of an award-winning, Web-accessible chat bot named Mitsuku told an interviewer in 2013.
“What keeps me going is when I get emails or comments in the chat-logs from people telling me how Mitsuku has helped them with a situation whether it was dating advice, being bullied at school, coping with illness or even advice about job interviews. I also get many elderly people who talk to her for companionship.”
Any advertiser who doesn’t sit bolt upright after reading that doesn’t understand the dark art of manipulation on which their craft depends.
Chat bots built by brands can be used for entertainment, but they can also be used to inform; imagine conversing with your bank or utility company’s bot when you have a customer-service question. And the ones Kik is working on can learn, says Mr. Livingston….”
The premise of course, is that artificial intelligence will continue to evolve exponentially; a valid and well-documented thesis. In the case of Kik (as in many other AI apps), the goal is to create a dynamic application that is continuously “self-learning”…so that with each interaction, the robot on the other end of the line becomes increasingly more intuitive and its responses ultimately become indecipherable from the responses one would expect from a human being. Bringing me to a new phrase that I’ll hereby and happily hypothecate to Chris: ” human beens”…aka HBs…definition: something that was once human.
For those who remember 2001: A Space Odyssey, the article by Mims is an intriguing update:
#Chatvertising: Native Content Gets a Kick from #Kik; Talk To The Bot
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