AI firm in SEA launches Insho Cast — the world’s first chatbot display advertising format

Southeast Asian AI firm HYPERLAB has a high volume artificial intelligence (AI) powered banner format to clients in Asia — Insho Cast.

The firm, based in Kuala Lumpur, developed the platform to serve ads on DoubleClick and partner Ad Networks.

Released in July,  the banners comply with IAB standards and require much less bandwidth than standard banner ads, capable of having more than 500 million conversations per day.

In a press release, CMO at HYPERLAB Chris Greenough said the platform gives publishers and marketers the capability of looking at advertising spaces as retail spaces, with the possibility of real customer interaction and sales directly taking place on third party websites.

The results have been nothing short of encouraging.

“In our last few campaigns, we were able to achieve 10-15X times better performance versus standard banner ads. Most recently, we were able to reduce cost per acquisition for an e-commerce brand by 17%. Why we can be so effective is because we can create a very dynamic and human experience. Lead forms and product discovery become a conversation and take place in that first moment of truth,” adds Greenough.

“Because we track conversational history, we can adapt and optimise the chatbot during the campaign period, improving performance and the experience without any disruption in impressions”.

In another campaign for a prominent property client, the chatbot helped close more than RM4.5m in sales, this time in partnership with a human sales agent.

At present, marketers fight low click through rates and high bounce rates, normally delivered from standard banner ads. (Industry CTR for standard banners is 0.1% and bounce rates for traffic driven by display advertising is often higher than 70%.)

HYPERLAB has built the platform to work hand-in-hand with programmatic display advertising. The technology to display the right ad to the right audience exists, but now that audience can engage in a conversation with a brand without needing to leave.

“We feel that we can show an immediate lift on campaign performance with these use cases that are focused on improving an advertisers bottom line”.