Fans love it because Deadpool subverts expectations by being self-aware. You can see a similar idea at play when the writers behind the TV show “30 Rock” created an episode where the characters debate the merits of creating a TV show. Or, to get really meta, when a cafe’s sandwich board proclaims, “This is a sign.”

Right now, budgets are frozen, technology spend has decreased for the time being, and buyers of all manner are fatigued from the barrage of “We’re here for you in uncertain times” emails. This self-aware approach offers marketers a lifeline. And it can be done with playful humor or straightforward analysis.

Going meta—using your product to market itself—can be a clever way to draw attention, stretch your budget, and be disarmingly and refreshingly honest, all while still selling your product.

No but seriously, this is a sign

Self-aware marketing works, but for a different reason than it works in media. While “going meta” in pop culture surprises and delights because it shatters the so-called “fourth wall” and draws people out of what they’re watching, meta marketing typically draws them in. It demonstrates the product by showing it.

Take the billboard pictured below by 3M, the maker of duct tape. The tape appears to be supporting the billboard—an allusion to its utility as a fix-all. It’s cheeky but also demonstrative.

Among my favorite meta assets ever—so enjoyable that I’m still sharing it years later—is the survey software startup Typeform’s article “The Rise of the Conversational Interface.” In it, the author demonstrates the rise and uses of chatbots … by inserting a chatbot into the article. As you read, you can ask the author questions about the article.

When I interviewed Paul Campillo, now the company’s head of brand and communications, I learned that when he started writing it, Typeform didn’t even offer chatbots. Now they do. And it’s because the self-aware chatbot article was such a smash hit that buyers demanded it.

“We were pitching blog ideas about chatbots and someone had this idea to insert one into the article to provide a director’s cut commentary,” Campillo said. “We said, yeah that’s great. But we’ll need a chatbot.”

So they made one. A developer on the team spent a tremendous amount of time trying to understand the structure of a conversation with flowcharts. This raised new questions that influenced the article, which then influenced the chatbot.

“The article was a huge success,” Campillo explained. “People started pinging the heck out of me on Twitter asking, ‘Hey, is this available?’ and after a while, we built it. Now it’s one of Typeform’s three offerings.”

Typeform’s success fits a pattern. People increasingly want things they can see, try, and apply without sales pressure. Consumers are fatigued and fed up with traditional marketing tactics. If your product is good enough, enthusiastic users will indirectly do your marketing for you. Product-led advocates implore marketers to let buyers see your product organically in action rather than just pouring money into paid ad channels.

Plus, going meta can be easier on marketers who are trying to figure out how to do their jobs in the middle of a pandemic recession while also reckoning with the country’s long unaddressed racial issues. There is no easy way to be both sensitive and clever, so brands are finding simple ways to show what they’re selling with a more honest approach that doesn’t sacrifice creativity.

I’ve seen more and more companies launching webinars on how they use their own software. The really good ones are building trust with no-BS stories of trial and error—just people trying to figure it out and help other people. This path gives potential customers a chance to see what they’re paying for without PR glitz.

From the calendar scheduling app startup Chili Piper inserting “book a meeting” links into its own marketing assets to the real estate AI startup Skyline AI using its own data to run reports, more brands are trying to use their software to advertise it.

And you know what they’re all finding? It’s both earning them attention and, in many instances, saving them money.

The budgetary benefits of self-aware marketing

Now that I’ve highlighted self-aware content, you’ll start to see it everywhere.

“If you’re lucky enough to have a product you can show without having to shoehorn it in, there’s really nothing more cost effective,” said James Winter, VP of marketing at Brandfolder. “We offer a DAM—an organizational platform for your company’s creative assets. When our sales reps reach out to prospects about Brandfolder, they create a Brandfolder, fill it with that company’s own assets, and send a link. People love it. It’s genuinely useful to the situation, gets them invested and comfortable with the product early, gets the point across, and yeah, it doesn’t cost us a thing.”

Self-aware marketing can also save you agency fees—particularly in B2B software—since this kind of content relies on internal expertise. If it’s really clever and sparks a discussion on social media, you’ll get a better bang for your marketing buck.

The customer data platform Segment, for example, ran a billboard campaign across major cities that got some major social media pull-through. It demonstrated the frustration people feel with bad data by buying billboards that addressed each city by its rival city’s name—in San Francisco., it read, “Good morning, LA!”

This @segment billboard in SF is well done pic.twitter.com/1u22MoHzpd

— austin petersmith (@awwstn) April 9, 2019

“This actor in L.A. got caught up in the joke of it all and posted a picture of our billboard to his followers asking if we meant it to be there—twice,” said Maya Spivak, Head of Global Brand Marketing and Communications at Segment. “We got tens of thousands of these wonderful organic impressions.”

If cost savings, added attention, and selling without appearing to sell aren’t enough to convince you to try meta marketing, there’s one more benefit: It’s oddly liberating. Plus, if your boss asks, why are you dedicated so much time to a self-aware project, you can fire off your own laconic Deadpool retort: “Because it’s my article.”

The post In Tough Times, Self-Aware Marketing Helps You Stand Out & Save Money appeared first on Contently.

Chatbots are not a new invention, and in 2018, they’re everywhere. There are chatbot boyfriends, therapists, and a even a chatbot politician running for office in New Zealand, hoping to represent the country in 2020.

For businesses, chatbots open up a world of customer service possibilities. They help customers leave feedback, schedule appointments, and order products quicker. Some bots already live in messaging apps like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, and while they might not offer as much conversation as SmarterChild, they can help you book a cab or order your favorite Starbucks drink. Evocreative predicts that 85 percent of customer interactions will be managed by chatbots by 2020. This stat strikes me as a little high, but I don’t discount the larger implication here: The way we experience customer service is changing rapidly.

What’s spurred the branded chatbot takeover? Mutual benefits for brands and customers. Retale recently surveyed U.S. millennial adult consumers, and 70 percent said they had a positive experience with chatbots in the past. And almost half of all U.S. consumers said they’d prefer to handle customer service interactions via some sort of messenger.

In many cases, companies will implement partial chatbot experiences. Sephora, for example, rolled out a chatbot last summer that can handle the beginning of a customer interaction on its own. People can schedule appointments or leave feedback through the bot, but it has to connect users to a human representative if it can’t address a customer’s questions.

Personally, I’m embracing the rise of the bots. Email and phone-based customer service interactions are often frustrating and full of terrible elevator music. I’m at least curious to see if bots can actually offer streamlined solutions to these woes. I also secretly hope that one day I’ll come across SmarterChild again, just to see another philosophical musing at the end of our interaction.

The post The Chatbot Revolution is Here appeared first on Contently.

My customer account for Pizza Hut linked to Messenger in seconds and didn’t require any new payment information. One large pepperoni, please. Same as last time? Yes, please. But instead of dealing with a stranger or another checkout screen, I was typing to a chatbot instead. No small talk. No dropped calls. The bot offered me a few promo items, but otherwise, the whole exchange was quick, easy, and largely indistinguishable from a human interaction. Is this still my address? Yep. The receipt came via email.

The company credited with selling the first item on the internet is now making the e-commerce even easier. Pizza Hut recently announced its new chatbot ordering feature as part of a massive social media rollout that debuted a few months ago. Conversational commerce is hotter than a Samsung battery right now, and the largest pizza chain in the world knows it, following competitors and contemporaries alike into a space still very much evolving.

But what if businesses are approaching chatbots all wrong?

What is the secret sauce?

Magnus Jern, president of mobile solutions company DMI, recently told the BBC that when chatbots try too hard to be natural, it diverts from the purpose of conversational commerce. Jern helped launch IKEA’s Anna chatbot in 2005, which was recently retired after 10 years. “In the beginning, we tried to impersonate a person, and we found that there was no reason to do that,” he said.

But the move is a curious one, especially when chatbots are on the rise. Earlier this year, KPCB’s Mary Meeker referred to them as the “secret sauce” of messaging in her keynote on digital trends.

However, academic research has suggested that consumers don’t want robots that can talk like humans. Some would argue, instead, that all we want is a smoother ordering process. A Harvard Business Review report from 2010 found that “loyalty has a lot more to do with how well companies deliver on their basic, even plain-vanilla promises than on how dazzling the service experience might be.”

In his book, Influence, Dr. Robert Cialdini, a professor who teaches psychology and marketing at Arizona State University, concluded that we’re more motivated (to act, purchase, click, etc.) when choice is limited.

Also, there’s a difference between talking to a human and a bot that technology may never be able to reconcile. According to a study published by JAMA, conversational agents like Siri or Google Now simply don’t understand the difference between “I’m dying” and “I’m dying of hunger” in a crisis.

In other words, ordering a pizza via chat isn’t so unique anymore, but predicting how that conversation might look in the future is a bit more challenging.

The commerce of chatbots

The term “chatterbox” was coined in 1994, the same year Pizza Hut filled its first online order. Today, the company is the largest pizza chain in the world—with roughly half of its orders coming through digital channels and more than 60 percent of those via mobile devices, per internal data.

“We all have to become students of human behavior,” Baron Concors, Pizza Hut’s global chief digital officer, told a MobileBeat audience in June.

Conversable, the Austin-based company behind Pizza Hut’s chatbot technology, is turning the study of human behavior into a thriving business. The software company is partnering rapidly with major brands like TGI Fridays and Whole Foods, using conversational messaging for self-service and on-demand content.

For some companies, customer service is one long conversation. For others, the conversation ends with a pizza delivery.

The chatbot ecosystem is exploding. Facebook now supports over 11,000 chatbots, plus a dedicated store. Apple recently debuted its own iMessage app store with iOS 10. And messaging apps, well suited for brand chatbots, have never been more popular. WhatsApp, for example, now has over 1 billion users. WeChat and Viber have hundreds of millions.

In June, Tommy Hilfiger announced its own chatbot designed with the help of Facebook’s Creative Shop and bot creator Msg.ai. According to TechCrunch, the social giant caught flack for hosting too many clumsy bots from outside developers. The partnership with Tommy Hilfiger lets the company reclaim some control over its new chatbot platform, while heeding the call for online concierges among high-end fashion brands.

As Tommy Hilfiger himself told TechCrunch, “We are obviously distributed in our own stores and in department stores, but going directly to the consumer is really part of the motive and the future of the omni-channel process.” Gigi, named after supermodel Gigi Hadid, will answer customers in a more natural style since, as CMO Avery Baker argued, no one wants to feel like they’re talking to the corporate animal anyway.

Calls for conversation

For some companies, customer service is one long conversation. For others, the conversation ends with a pizza delivery.

“Even the most digitally tuned-in customer will want to know that they are connected with someone who can put themselves in their shoes,” said Simon Hunt, director of customer experience at Firstsource Solutions, a business-process outsourcing firm based out of India.

In August, the travel app Skyscanner estimated a layover of 413,768 hours to a shocked consumer looking for a cheap flight. When the man posted about the error on Facebook, a Skyscanner rep responded with a clever and lighthearted comment that eventually went viral and generated press coverage. To clarify, the technology screwed up, and then a human came in to clear things up.

“Bots are easy. Conversations are hard.”

Conversocial’s CMO Paul Johns told Digiday that such unscripted rapport is a growing trend. Proving a resolution is great, but opening up a meaningful dialogue may be even better. Per CeBit, 71 percent of people who receive a quick response from a brand on social media are likely to recommend that brand to others. It’s no surprise that chatbots are being considered to automate the job.

But despite these developments, there’s still a weird tension surrounding the conversational commerce movement. People want quick, straightforward service, but they also seem to value human empathy. Is it possible for a chatbot to provide both, even if consumers know they’re talking to an algorithm?

Conversations are hard

Ben Lamm, the CEO and co-founder of Conversable, probably said it best: “Bots are easy. Conversations are hard.”

In the race for creating tech with personality, businesses seem stuck on naming their bots after anything other than a tool. Anna. Gigi. Facebook even has a bartender bot named Shaky.

But chatbots don’t care what we call them, and, let’s face it, expressing our trust in AI impacts my comfort, not their effectiveness. That’s why we’re still anthropomorphizing machines.

“Giving something a human name is a way of exerting control over it,” writes Adrienne LaFrance in The Atlantic, “a reminder that it works for you, that it exists within a human construct, even when the machine itself is wholly indifferent.”

It’s hard to pinpoint how much conversation and functionality is necessary, but it’s safe to say that functionality is ultimately what will drive revenue.

Chris Messina, the developer who coined the term “conversational commerce” about two years ago (and also came up with the word “hashtag”), gave a talk at the MobileBeat conference where Pizza Hut made its bot announcement this summer. Messina showed the audience his own bot, an integrated messaging platform, and went over the evolution of the bot movement.

Toward the end of his presentation, Messina went over a few rules for both ethics. “A bot should be able to describe itself,” he said. “What it does, how it handles information, if there’s a human on the other end monitoring stuff. Bots should have a similar type of disclosure statement.”

That’s all well and good, but for the most part, the only rule I care about is if the bot can get my order right the next time I want a pizza.

The post Why We May Be Thinking About Chatbots All Wrong appeared first on Contently.