CANNES — Chatbots may have been one of the big tech trends of 2016, but few advertisers have yet embraced the idea of making artificial brand personas that consumers can interact with.
Mindshare is one agency that has dipped its toe in the water – but it now thinks artificial intelligence technology may help catapult the brand bots idea thanks to more natural linguistic experiences.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Mindshare US CEO Adam Gerhart explains that his company was a beta partner for IBM’s Watson AI technology. He says the application of AI is diverse.
“It’s about how we engage with consumers more readily, in a more appropriate way, whereby they feel it’s more personalized, relevant and something that they want to engage with,” he says.
“Chatbots is interesting but it’s still one-dimensional – there are still limitations to the number of different responses you can program, whereas (with) things like IBM’s Watson, there’s almost an infinite number of iterations that you can come up with – from a messaging standpoint, an executional standpoint – and that’s what we’re really excited about.”
ButGerhart concedes a risk that the industry may focus too much on using technology and data to solve problems.
He sees the ad world bifurcating along the lines of “EQ” and “IQ” – emotional intelligence and data savvy – with the best campaigns employing a mixture of both.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s AI Series from Cannes Lions 2017, presented by The Weather Company, an IBM Business. For more from the series, please visit this page.
