What Happened
BET network is launching a Facebook Messenger bot to serve as a companion to the BET Experience, a four-day festival in Los Angeles that will culminate in the BET Awards, which air June 25. Working with bot-building startup Conversable, BET designed the bot to be capable of answering common inquiries such as directions and set times. It will also serve up content like GIFs and other media of the festival as they happen, providing attendees with fun, shareable content to post to social media to amplify the event’s earned reach.
What Brands Need To Do
Previously, entertainment brands such as Sony and NatGeo have created chatbots to engage fans via conversations with fictional characters, be it a villain from the Resident Evil franchise or Albert Einstein. In contrast, BET’s take on chatbot is a lot more utilitarian, functioning primarily as a customer service bot and content dispenser to improve the event experience for the festival attendees. This is a cool take on how an entertainment brand can use conversational services, like a chatbot or an Alexa skill, to improve the customer experience in a fun, innovative way.
How We Can Help
The Lab has extensive experience in building Alexa Skills and chatbots to reach consumers on conversational interfaces. So much so that we’ve built a dedicated conversational practice called Dialogue. The “Miller Time” Alexa Skill we developed with Drizly for Miller Lite is a good example of how Dialogue can help brands build a conversational customer 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 conversational interfaces, or to leverage the Lab’s expertise to take on related client opportunities within the IPG Mediabrands, please contact our Client Services Director Samantha Barrett (samantha@ipglab.com) to schedule a visit to the Lab.
Source: Digiday