Startup AdLingo turns ads into conversations with chatbots

The American startup AdLingo wants to bring chatbots and other communication assistants to online advertisements. The startup comes from Google’s Area 120 incubator. Co-founder and general manager Vic Fatnani has also worked on Google ads for over ten years.

“One of the things we saw happening was a shift from users and consumers to a more communicative medium,” said Fatnani to TechCrunch. “Everything becomes more communicative, whether it’s through devices like your phone, your speaker and ultimately your car. We asked ourselves, “If this shift is taking place, why can’t marketing be more communicative?”

A big problem according to Fatnani is that companies make a chatbot, but have trouble getting the chatbot in front of the audience. According to him, advertising is the perfect medium for solving this problem. Instead of building a chatbot that consumers then find on a website or app, companies can integrate it into their ads. Consumers who see the ad can then ask questions and give feedback.

Applications

“Imagine that you want to launch a new type of soft drink in Brazil, a market you’ve never been active in. Imagine if you could now place a communicative ad and get people to vote on what taste they think the soda should be.”

However, there is also an example from real life: an advertisement for the Allstar Kia. “AdLingo lets our customers check our inventory, determine the value of their car if they exchange it and make an appointment with a salesman”, says Chris Ferrall, director of internet marketing at Kia. “And all this in an interactive experience that they encounter in the place where they are.”

The chatbots themselves are not made by AdLingo itself. “The companies and developers bring the communicative experience to us, and we spread it all over the internet,” says Fatnini. To make this possible, the platform integrates with tools for chatbots such as Dialogue Flow, Microsoftbot Framework, LiveEngage and Blip.