Categories Name : Mobile & Tablets

Sub-Category : Best Innovation in Mobile Marketing

Entry Name (Campaign) : Amazon Prime Video’s Comicstaan 2: World’s Funniest Messenger Bot

Covering Note / Overall Experience

Comicstaan Season 2 was a nine-episode series that brought together seven amongst the biggest comedians in India, to find the next big name in stand-up. Hosted by Abish Mathew and Urooj Ashfaq, the top ten contestants were judged and mentored by a seven-member jury panel. The jury comprised of Zakir Khan, Biswa Kalyan Rath, Kanan Gill, Kenny Sebastian, Sumukhi Suresh, Kaneez Surka, and Neeti Palta. We had to interact & engage with our fans and other audiences across social platforms and get high-quality user-initiated interactions with our brand.
We thus created APAC's first, one-of-its kind multi-functional entertainment bot: BOTFunny that interacted with our comedy-loving- audience in a conversational & comic tone and became a one stop shop for everything comedy on internet.
The bot became a central destination for our social activities and had a multi-functionality like:
a. Weekly Emoji Awards (where fans vote for their favourite contestants each week using a �� Emoji)
b. Memeistaan League (an activity conceptualized to generate memes and get fans to be the voice of our brand)
c. World of Comicstaan – An alternate channel for disseminating information about the show, follow scorecards, meet contestants & judges, Watch trailers & behind the scenes

An integrated social media campaign was created to promote various modules of the bot through multiple channels like organic & paid campaigns, talent posts, influencers, content partners and other mediums.

The bot helped us in generating overall 1.02Mn+ conversations in 2- month duration of campaign, with an Avg. of 19 messages/sessions. Over 6K memes generated through our meme maker deployed on the bot. The overall promotions resulted in 18% lift in recall & 9% lift in awareness with reach of 50mn+ users.

Concept (25%) *(250 words)-

Concept

Laughter is the most meaningful connection between friends, especially comedy lovers. Whether it's with pranks, memes, sketches or jokes, laughter is the most popular way for people to connect with people in India. To our wider circle of friends on social media, very often than not, sharing silliness is how we keep this tenuous social connection alive. We mimicked this people-to-people behaviour to create a people-to-brand connection.
We thus created APAC's first, one-of-its kind multi-functional entertainment bot: BOTFunny that interacted with our comedy-loving- audience in a conversational & comic tone and became a one stop shop for everything comedy on internet.

Innovation

We had one singular approach while creating the bot: Humanising Technology to improve the experience with the user.

1. The bot personality was crafted to ensure a conversational UX with tons of show related gifs packed with local humor in Hinglish.

2. We personalized conversations to be life-like, friendly and relatable to the user.

3. The bot became a central destination for our social activities and had a multi-functionality like:
a. Weekly Emoji Awards (where fans vote for their favourite contestants each week using a �� Emoji)
b. Memeistaan League (an activity conceptualized to generate memes and get fans to be the voice of our brand)
c. World of Comicstaan – An alternate channel for disseminating information about the show, follow scorecards, meet contestants & judges, Watch trailers & behind the scenes

4. We plugged in different modules at relevant intervals to ensure higher interactions on the bot.

5. We also reminded people to tune in after every episode via push notifications

Execution

To promote this bot, we leveraged our talent who are influencers themselves to set narrative and created media units specifically tailored for mobile platforms.

We created & ran custom ads for each aspect of the chatbot through Click-to-Messenger Ads. The clever use of white space helped direct viewers to the 'send message' button.

We also dialled up local humor through Hindi click to messenger ads. Organic posts were created each week to reach out to the existing community of Comicstaan and Amazon Prime Video each week to drive UGC through bot modules like Emoji Awards and Memeistaan League. An influencer campaign & talent-led promotions were initiated to further promote the bot experience & bring scale. The campaign was promoted on Twitter, Tiktok, Youtube and other digital platforms.

BOTFunny thus became the centre of the social initiatives for Comicstaan 2. Through this campaign Prime Video India became the first brand in the entertainment category to unlock Messenger in India. The success has paved a path for more Messenger experiences for key upcoming shows.

Results

The bot helped us in generating overall 1.02Mn+ conversations in 2- month duration of campaign, with an Avg. of 19 messages/sessions. Over 6K memes generated through our meme maker deployed on the bot. The overall promotions resulted in 18% lift in recall & 9% lift in awareness with reach of 50mn+ users. We saw a significant amount of positive mentions on social platforms for the bot experience and a few of our top users on the bot had a session time of 1 hour to 2 hours (the session ended if the users kept the chatbot idle for 5 mins). Our campaign created enough buzz outside Facebook and got featured in the most popular Indian media websites and newspapers like Scoopwhoop, The Quint, The Indian Express & others.