What Happened
Ads are coming soon to Facebook Messenger as the social network announced its plan to start testing display ads in its chat app, which now counts over one billion monthly active users, in Thailand and Australia in the coming weeks. The ads will be in a scrollable Carousel format and will be limited to just the Messenger home screen, meaning that they won’t be infiltrating your conversations for now.
What Brands Need To Do
Given the global reach of Messenger, it makes perfect sense for Facebook to start monetizing the massive amount of consumer attention it has congregated on the chat app. It is, however, unclear how long it would take before such ad products will be made available to U.S. brands. In the meantime, brands looking to capture customer attention on chat apps should consider building a branded chatbot to engage with mobile users and drive conversations.
How We Can Help
The Lab has extensive experience in building branded chatbots to reach consumers on messaging apps. So much so that we’ve built a dedicated conversational practice called Dialogue. The NiroBot we built in collaboration with Ansible for Kia is a good example of how Dialogue can help brands build a chatbot experience supercharged by our stack of technology partners with best-in-class solutions and an insights engine that extracts business intelligence from conversational data.
If you’d like to learn more about how to effectively reach consumers on messaging apps and other conversational interfaces, or to leverage the Lab’s expertise to take on related clients and learning opportunities within the IPG Mediabrands, please contact our Client Services Director Samantha Holland ([email protected]) to schedule a visit to the Lab.
Source: VentureBeat
