With the rise of AI, advertising is getting way more chatty, with new interactive formats that look and feel like messaging on your phone. These formats allow brands to have real-time conversations with consumers. This more personalised, engaging experience can help you get to know your customers better and foster deeper connections.

In September, Microsoft launched its first conversational ad product – Compare and Decide Ads – developed for Bing’s AI-powered chat. It’s another jump towards more user-friendly, dynamic interfaces that consumers are increasingly expecting.

At Embrace we’ve wasted no time in leveraging conversational ads technology for our clients and have been impressed with the results. We created a chat-based app experience for a trade event which achieved great engagement and click-out rates to further content. It meant our client could find out more about attendees’ concerns and what they are interested in. Now we’re using the insights to make the new ad format even more effective at the next event.

A friendly and personalized user experience

Conversational ads use a friendly UI that people feel familiar with as it’s similar to messaging apps.​ Ads are automated and use more natural language between brands and consumers.​ The user can delve further into what interests them through a ‘choose your own path’ experience.

The format helps serve more personalised content and drives higher quality engagement.​

What are the benefits for businesses and marketers?

  • Unlock valuable insights. The format allows you to understand your audience behaviour and what they are interested in.
  • Painless production. There are templates to populate, integrated with leading ad serving platforms.
  • Build it once, deploy it everywhere. Once created, the application can be used in media environments, social media environments and across all ATL and BTL channels with QR code activation (for example OOH, print, on-pack, etc)
  • Multiple calls to action. Drive campaign objectives for each individual journey
  • Comprehensive report dashboard. You can track engagements flow and CTA through a detailed dashboard in real time.
  • Carbon neutral campaigns. The application we use is certified Climate Neutral, helping you to meet sustainability and carbon offset goals

A three-step creative process

When creating conversational ads with clients, we start by defining the audience and user journeys, plus agree on any functionality interactions such as data capture. After developing the outline of each interaction on the user journeys, it’s time to create content, working collaboratively on copy and images. Then we create the prototype to be approved and signed off. After that it goes into development, to be populated with the approved content.

Conclusion

As customers come to expect more interactivity and personalisation, conversational advertising helps deepen relationships and improves brand loyalty. Valuable data collection provides insights that can steer marketing activities. And with a build-once-deploy-anywhere model, and 24/7 availability, this can present cost savings on traditional advertising.

If you’d like to chat to us about conversational advertising, do get in touch.