Chat bots are a brand's best friend... again

If you're old enough to have had an AOL Instant Messenger account, then you may remember Jill020306, a curious teenager who kept getting creepy phone calls she couldn't resist answering. As part of the marketing campaign for the 2006 horror flick When A Stranger Calls, the ad agency Universal McCann built a chatbot that would play the part of Jill Johnson in an AOL Instant Messenger conversation. What's old is new again and today Sequel, "the chatbot platform that enables creators and brands to build conversational personas for entertainment and media," has launched an experience to help market Now You See Me 2. Things have changed, technologically and otherwise, in the past ten years. Sequel's bot focuses on Kik and Facebook Messenger, not AOL. Besides the platform changing, the bigger question worth answering is, has the technology powering chatbots improved to a point where they might offer something more than a mildly amusing piece of marketing campaign?