AI-powered shopping agents are all the rage. Some, like Walmart’s Sparky and Amazon’s Rufus, have become household names. There’s also a crop of emerging startups dedicated to helping advertisers build their own agents.
AI monetization platform Dappier is going a step further by helping marketers develop off-platform brand agents.
On Monday, Dappier announced a new ad format called Sponsored Conversations, which allows advertisers to insert a custom brand agent into AI chat sessions on publisher sites.
One early adopter is baby monitor brand Miku, which sees the agent function as a way to differentiate its products from its competitors’ products, said Founder Eric White, including the fact that its monitors are contactless and work without any wearable components.
“In a short video or banner ad, we can’t convey what it means to be a contact-free monitor,” said White, citing ease of use and lack of cleaning as two standout features. If potential customers don’t do “enough homework” or watch an explainer video all the way through, they won’t get the full story.
A live chat, on the other hand, he said, “allows them to do that homework in real time.”
If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em
That’s the pitch to advertisers.
But Dappier is also “squarely focused” on publisher solutions, Co-Founder and CEO Dan Goikhman told AdExchanger. Publishers are in dire need of new ways to increase traffic and monetization.
Lilly Broadcasting, for example, which operates local TV and radio news sites and stations in the Caribbean Islands and in several US markets, including Pennsylvania and New York, has seen its traffic decrease by double digits in recent years, according to Doug Rogers, one of Lilly’s digital managers. Although Lilly doesn’t have stats on exactly how much of the drop is due to AI search, it’s certainly been a contributor, he said.
Implementing a chatbot directly on its sites demonstrates to readers that they can “get the same experience” directly from their news source as they would from ChatGPT, said Rogers. Since launching the chatbot in March, Lilly has seen “great” results, he said, with roughly 5% of Lilly’s readers engaging with it.
Programmatic progress
But what’s the experience like for users?
There may be several prompts based on an article’s context that appear at the bottom of an article. When a user clicks on one, it launches a conversation with the publisher agent, said Mark Balabanian, Dappier’s chief business officer.
The agents only pull from a publisher’s own site content unless the site owner opts to “augment” with third-party content, he said, like weather or stock market data.
Once a conversation is underway, users may now also see a sponsored prompt from a brand that, if clicked, launches a new conversation, this time with a brand agent.
The prompt to begin a sponsored conversation is determined by whichever advertiser won the programmatic ad auction for the banner slot.
The new solution was designed to fit neatly into a publisher’s existing ad tech stack, said Balabanian, adding that the goal isn’t to “displace” the current programmatic ecosystem.
Sponsored Conversations are intended to serve as an alternative to the less desirable option of “being destroyed by centralized AI agents,” Balabanian quipped.
Taking off the training wheels
At the end of the day, Dappier’s goal is straightforward: To give publishers a new revenue stream that improves, rather than disrupts, the user experience.
Because the ads are contextual to the content, they feel “less like an ad,” Rogers said, and more like a “part of the experience.”
The chat also keeps people active on Lilly Broadcasting’s sites for longer, he added, because they can learn about a relevant product without having to leave the site.
The brand agent, meanwhile, is trained on whatever content a brand provides, which, in Miku’s case, was the link to its website, which includes an FAQs page and key talking points, such as the age range its products cater to and the fact that its monitor doesn’t require a wearable.
Miku has only been testing the agent for a few weeks, but it’s already driving results, said White. The brand has been getting more qualified leads, with people spending more time on its site, actively browsing products and even adding items to their cart, rather than bouncing after reaching the homepage, he said.
Roughly half of the people who engage with Miku’s agent on a publisher’s site ultimately click the call-to-action button that brings them to a purchase page.
The agent “is like an advocate for us,” said White, “telling our story at scale to every customer.”
