By Christopher Mims
This month, with little fanfare, the most popular chat app among
teens in the U.S. launched a feature that could be the future of
advertising. Or, at the least, it marks the dawn of a new age in
how brands engage.
People conversing directly with brands via bots. I call it
chatvertising.
I can hear hisses from the peanut gallery already, and you could
argue advertising is the last area of human endeavor where we need
more innovation. But what if the metaphorical "conversation"
marketers always claim to be having with us became literal?
Kik, a chat service like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger, claims
that four in 10 U.S. teens are active users of its service. And
now, thanks to the application of a decades-old technology--the
chat bot--those Kik-using teens are having something like actual
conversations with a half dozen brands, including Moviefone, Funny
or Die, and the Kik team itself.
Here's what's going on: In the mid-60s, MIT professor Joseph
Weizenbaum developed a computer program called ELIZA, which could
engage in open-ended conversation with a real human being. Over
time these chat bots have gotten better and better at interacting
with humans, mostly because programmers have loaded them up with
knowledge about the real world. They can also learn from their
conversations, becoming ever more skilled at fooling us into
thinking that they, too, are intelligent.
Thanks to the rise of chat apps--WhatsApp has 500 million users
world-wide and agreed to be purchased by Facebook Inc. for $19
billion in February, and its competitors in Asia are no less
popular--there is finally a place in which smartphone users are
spending their time where a chat bot might be a good fit. And
transforming inanimate objects--"brands"--into things we can
converse with, is what Ted Livingston, founder of Waterloo,
Ontario-based Kik has in mind.
"If you could chat with a brand in the same way you chat with a
friend, that's powerful," says Mr. Livingston.
If it all sounds a bit far-fetched, consider this precedent from
Line, a chat app from Japan with 400 million registered users. In
October 2013 Paul McCartney's handlers registered an account on
Line, and paid the company to create "stickers," which users
exchange on chat apps and are so popular they've become a major
source of revenue. To get the stickers, users had to opt-in to Mr.
McCartney's Line account that "chats" with its followers by sending
them updates about the singer.
Mr. McCartney has 2 million followers on Twitter, but on Line he
has 9.3 million. Kik's vision is to take this model and go one
better: What if Mr. McCartney (or his handlers) wasn't just talking
at his fans, but actually conversing with them?
Presently, Kik's chat bots are primitive, the one run by the Kik
team itself will tell jokes and is the closest to simulating actual
conversation, while the ones belonging to brands can only respond
by pushing more content at the user. That's deliberate, says Mr.
Livingston, as there is some worry at this stage in the development
of the technology that a more autonomous chat bot might start
saying things that could damage a brand.
Chat apps are enormously popular outside the U.S., where
carriers' practice of charging users for every text message they
send provided a powerful incentive to use the free apps. But there
has always been some question about how they would make money.
WhatsApp, for example, doesn't carry advertising, and Mark
Zuckerberg has declared his intention to keep it that way. And
WeChat, which has 400 million users, mostly in China, severely
restricts how often advertisers can reach out to users.
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.
So imagine this scenario, which is a version of what Mr.
Livingston says his team aspires to: Taco Bell wants to roll out a
new flavor of Doritos Locos Tacos. Maybe this one is "X-tra spicy,"
and it has the personality and verbal tics to match. Fifty or so
brand representatives, real human beings, could have chat
conversations with customers at the outset, and the chat engine
would learn from those interactions, gradually becoming more
autonomous, until it could automatically handle thousands of
simultaneous conversations.
This is what native advertising in chat apps looks like. And
chat apps, we keep hearing, are the future of social media. Mark
Zuckerberg, are you listening?
Write to Christopher Mims at christopher.mims@wsj.com
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