A presentation I gave at a Google Firestarter event in July 2016 on the rise of chat, messaging and bots and what this means for digital marketing.

1. Copyright © Econsultancy
@AshleyFriedlein
What do bots mean for digital
marketing?
The Future of Digital Marketing
June 2016
Ashley Friedlein
President, Centaur Marketing & Founder, Econsultancy

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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. Cloud
2. Artificial intelligence
3. Natural language
processing
4. 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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