2018 Awards Preview – Most Effective Chatbot Solution

Ahead of our 2018 Effective Mobile Marketing Awards, well be previewing the nominees in each category, giving you a glimpse at the high quality of entries weve seen this year. Social media gives brands and consumers alike a unique way to connect. These entries all made the most of this powerful channel to reach and engage their audiences.

Lego, S4M and Carat – Taking the Chat out of the Bot


For this campaign in Singapore, LEGO was looking to reach parent shoppers during the competitive Christmas season. After LEGO’s key retail partner in the region, Toys R Us, filed for bankruptcy in 2017, LEGO needed a way to communicate with parents directly.

The solution was a LEGO Santa chatbot, accessed when consumers clicked on mobile banner ads with a call to action to ‘Chat with Santa’. The chatbot showcased the LEGO range with mobile-optimised image sizes; gave advice on the right product for children of different ages and interests; and raised awareness of alternative retailers.

The campaign delivered high user engagement. Compared to the 2016 Christmas campaign with the same media budget, LEGO saw twice the number of clicks. On average, the chatbot conversation sessions was just over 2 minutes long. The landing page, in this case the chatbot conversation flow, saw entry rates three times higher than the industry average and user interaction rates four times higher than industry average. The “Restart” button option in the chatbot was one of the top 10 buttons clicked, demonstrating audiences were eager to explore more features in the chatbot.

LEGO saw a 77 per cent sales uplift for Christmas 2017 when compared to the previous month’s performance. Among the products recommended by the LEGO Santa chatbot, they also saw an impressive 300 per cent sales uplift compared to the weeks prior to the campaign activation.

Roadshow and Isobar Australia – American Assassin
For the Australian theatrical launch of ‘American Assassin’, Roadshow tasked Isobar Australia with facilitating awareness of the story and characters. Isobar also had to create a platform that could be re-activated in the event of possible sequels.

The strategy was to let audiences know there’s more to American Assassin than they thought by getting them to understand the skills and psychological attributes required to be an elite assassin.

To do so, Isobar created the internet’s first assassin-training chatbot, pulling apart Facebook Messenger functionality and gamifying every aspect of it to create 125 modules that tested users’ ability across six core skillsets – Perception, Languages and Codes, Attention, Morals and Ethics, Dexterity and Mental Agility. This was supported by six assessment modules that tested what they learnt, before ranking and scoring recruits.

Over the 15 days of the campaign, the chatbot saw 92 days of overall engagement, including 11 hours of gameplay from a single user, and sent half a million messages in the process.

Udacity and Passage AI – Online Enrolment Campaign
Online learning firm Udacity saw chatbots as an exciting new technology that could help current and prospective students discover the best learning opportunities for them. Working with Passage AI, it developed an AI-powered chatbot to help prospective students visiting its website find appropriate courses and enrol with. The success of the program would be measured by a single metric: increased student enrolment.

Initially, the bot was only served to 5 of website visitors. The team measured the impact the chatbot had on prospective students and made adjustments based on feedback. Over the course of a few weeks, the bot was slowly ramped up to 100 per cent.

The results were impressive. In an A/B test of the chatbot against a no live chat, Udacity saw a 41 per cent increase in new student enrolments through the website. The initial implementation has been so successful that Udacity is now looking at additional chatbot investments.

Walkers and AnalogFolk – Walkers Win Live
Saturday nights are one of the few occasions where the whole family gathers around to share something together. Whether that’s a brilliantly entertaining moment of trashy TV, or passing a big bag of crisps around.

Walkers wanted to establish Walkers sharing packs as the crisp of choice for family nights in front of the TV. As part of this goal, Walkers sponsored Saturday night programmes on ITV, with a series of TV ads appearing in the breaks of the I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here, The X-Factor and Ant & Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway. Those TV ads promoted an on-pack competition – a big weekly giveaway themed around the shows, with the grand prize draw announced each week live on Saturday night TV.

To encourage entries, Walkers hijacked the second screen, taking over people’s phones on a Saturday night and using its competition to keep them entertained during the ad breaks. In a first for Facebook, it used Facebook Messenger codes printed on packs to enter the competition. People scanned the codes and then chatted to a friendly AI chatbot ‘host’ which helped them enter the competition in seconds.

Once they were in, Walkers offered them something to keep them engaged in the ad breaks. Every Saturday night, viewers were entertained with a different batch of jokes, quizzes and games themed around the show on TV. The chatbot turned potential pressure points (like sharing your email address or agreeing to Ts & Cs) into moments of fun and peppered the whole night with silliness, all delivered in Walkers’ irreverent tone of voice.

Winners were contacted via the chatbot and email, with giveaways enticing them to try new flavours and have another go the following week. To make the prize draw a bigger family moment, in the final ad spot of the evening, brand ambassador Gary Lineker opens an envelope to reveal the winner’s name, which is added in real time.

The results were impressive. The competition entry target was surpassed by 6 per cent. 48 per cent of users adopted Chatbot as their preferred entry route, beating the target of 30 per cent. And 28 per cent of chatbot users entered the competition twice or more.

“Shifting our competition entry mechanic from one we’d used successfully for years was a big risk,” says Ian Maybank, digital lead, WESA Snacks at PepsiCo. “No FMCG brand had done this before. But we were prepared to try this. What we hadn’t thought about was the ongoing engagement we could create with a chatbot. And it’s now something we’re considering across a range of PepsiCo brands.”

Join us to find out the winners of our 2018 Effective Mobile Marketing Awards at our prestigious Awards Ceremony on 15 November. Tickets are available now, so book your place and celebrate the industrys best and brightest with us.