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What do bots mean for digital marketing?

The Future of Digital MarketingJune 2016

Ashley FriedleinPresident, Centaur Marketing & Founder, Econsultancy

@AshleyFriedlein

1. BOTMANIA

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Facebook – Messenger, M etc.

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"Conversations as a platform [...] as profound an impact as previous shifts we've had."Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft

Microsoft – Cortana etc.

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Google – Allo, Assistant, Pepper etc.

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Why now the excitement around bots?

1. Cloud2. Artificial intelligence3. Natural language

processing4. Messaging explosion

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2. WHAT’S WHAT IN BOT

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Conversational Commerce

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Conversational Content

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Conversational Service

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Conversational Productivity

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3. AM I BOT OR NOT?

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But do people want to interact with bots?

• Would you trust a computer/bot over a human?

• Would you rather phone the call centre? Or write in with a letter?

• What about personal conversations? Better with the impersonality of a bot?

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“Siri is the most used virtual assistant, Amazon Echo is the most admired and Facebook M is the most anticipated” Adobe Digital Index, May 2016

Virtual Assistants’ popularity

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How should marketers approach bots?

• Beware ‘uncanny valley’• Be very careful of attempting ‘branded’ bots with

character, attitude, humour, feeling etc • For most… stick to service/productivity bots to start with• Bot maturity framework:

– Level 1 = functional request/response– Level 2 = scheduled tasks, assistive– Level 3 = predictive, smart

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4.FUTUREBOT

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What if bot you interacted with other bots? Or perhaps IoT devices? Facebot?

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“Push based alerts are evolving into notifications, into rich action based notifications, into bots.” John Borthwick, CEO, betaworks, March 2016

Thin media

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Why this is so relevant for (digital) marketing

• Anticipatory intelligence: pre-empting a customer’s actions before they do to deliver outstanding customer experience (CX)

• Personalisation at scale: intimate but automated (again to optimise CX)

• Experiential (fun, natural) but purposeful, useful, too – the killer blend for the future of CX?

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THANK YOU. QUESTIONS?

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