CHATBOTS REVIEW: Katy Perry bot
Congratulations to Katy for getting the “Very responsive to messages” label
Love it or hate but chatbots are hitting the main stage. First Snoop Dogg, then fictional, but still very horny Christian Grey (50 Shades of grey) and now Katy Perry adopt a chatbot with a huge 67 million following. Katy’s bot was launched as a publicity supporting machine during the launch of her new album — Witness. There has been absolutely no noise supporting the bot launch since its purpose is very simple — promote the new album and the world tour (that is the reason why the bot asks for your location).
The man behind the bot is Josh Bocanegra. His “thing” is giving a persona to a bot, by adding very humanly little touches (i.e. making the bot pretend to be typing by adding little delays, so the response wouldn’t be instant). Josh claims that the conversation design was data-driven rather than opinion-based, it is actually very believable since it’s been more than a year since the moments everybody as well as in fact “nobody” ruched their head into the new over-hyped technology and over-flooded the market with thousands of useless beginner-bots created with the sole purpose — to enter the chatbot race.
This year everything changed and we have some real numbers to work with. For example, according to the Forrester Research, we can see a realistic 20–60% response rate, which is still huge if compared to email-marketers numbers.
It is still very weird that we don’t see a lot of big names like Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga adopting the conversational commerce movement and deploying bots on their 70+ million fan FB pages and selling merchandise directly in the conversational thread.
The Katy bot launch was a very carefully orchestrated event that has put an end to an era of Chatbot early adopters and a start to a new phase.
P.S. I wouldn’t suggest doubting Katy’s marketing team efforts. If you step back almost 10 years ago, there’s been a lot of critics saying she’s a one-song artist. Time and nine #1 in US songs proved many to be wrong.
You can talk to Katy Bot here
