The company’s co-founder and CTO talks about how the brand supplements the marketing efforts of international film production houses, with AI-driven consumer engagement.
One of the biggest Hollywood releases this summer, has been ‘Fast X’, the 10th installment in the ‘Fast saga’. The film was released only in cinema halls. Universal Pictures, the movie’s production house, took the digital-first route to promote it, by releasing multiple promotional films on the ‘Fast Saga’ Meta handle.
If you comment under a post on this handle, you will receive a message from the ‘Fast Saga’. If one chooses to interact with the handle, it provides multiple options to interact with the film. One such interaction, leads the users to this message, “Thanks for joining the #FAST crew. Get ready to fasten your seatbelt”, and then directs them to book tickets at the nearest cinema hall.
These interactions are enabled by a conversational AI that is developed by leading tech company, Amplify.ai. The company enables conversational AI for brands to reach out to their target base. It has also recently ventured into driving consumer engagements on digital platforms for media companies.
“With marketing AI, we want to have conversations with the consumers that don’t end easily. As of now, we’ve partnered with the production houses behind ‘Fast X’, ‘Spiderman’, ‘Citadel’, ‘The Mandalorian’, among a few others. With AI, our goal is to talk in the voice of the brand that a person is engaging with,” Manoj Malhotra, co-founder and CTO, Amplify.ai, tells afaqs!.
He adds that the brand elevates marketing into conversations that are immersive and persistent. Amplify.ai’s KPI, with these conversations, is to drive more consumer engagement for a brand’s product(s).
For ‘Fast X’, the brand can engage with the consumers for an elongated period of time, shares Malhotra. These conversations are shareable in nature, as the users can share content generated on their feeds, he adds. The company employs scriptwriters to write the AI-generated dialogues.
“AI pitches a few different things to the consumers, once they decide to go forth with the engagement. It helps you to create your own short-form content. AI takes multiple video clips from the movie, asks the user to upload their photos and then integrates the (user’s) images within the video streams. Also, you can look up for or book tickets for a movie within this conversation,” states Malhotra.
A consumer can start the conversation by just adding a comment on a post of the film handle. AI filters who to engage with each comment. If the comment is negative in nature, then one won’t receive a marketing message from the brand.
“Movie studios still release trailers, etc. We try to bridge marketing and conversational AI. They have the content, but don’t have a solid distribution mechanism. We allow that. We give them a medium for giving an exclusive experience to the consumers. With this, engagement takes off very well,” Malhotra informs.
Marketing communications made on these platforms have resulted in an average engagement of more than 50 minutes for Amplify.ai, Malhotra asserts.
Akansha Sudan, marketing head, Amplify.ai, shares that the brand is now looking to expand its presence in the Indian movie business – Bollywood, etc. – as well. She also highlighted that Amplify.ai has partnered with one bollywood movie which is scheduled to release this summer. She adds that the ticketing feature of AI is attracting brands to look into conversational AI for promotional activities.
“We have recently started developing conversational experiences specific to the Indian market. For the latest instalment of ‘Spiderman’, our AI chatbot poses as an Indian person, who is ‘Spiderman’. This character interacts with people.”
At the end of the Across the Spider-Verse trailer, a message is flashed that says, “Text 718-808-8342 to join the Spider Society.” Sony pictures also tweeted out the number for the US audience. It sees a huge engagement globally. Malhotra says that the number got engagement from other parts of the world as well.
