Adtech Firms Test New Concept with Autonomous Bot Delivery Campaign
Contactless delivery has given consumers a lifeline during Covid-19, with industry analysts finding that nearly 70% of people have ordered delivery during the pandemic. While food delivery platforms like Postmates, DoorDash, and GrubHub have all launched no-contact options, they generally rely on human drivers leaving food on the ground outside people’s front doors. With the health risks and potential for mix-ups, it’s less than ideal.
A better solution might be the one being rolled out by Wrapify. Just this morning, the company announched the launch of a first-of-its-kind campaign that could take autonomous bot delivery to the next level.
The campaign, which is a partnership among the robotic delivery service Kiwibot, the remote sales team platform Gong, and the performance-driven ad tech platform Wrapify, is being launched initially in San Jose, with plans to expand to the Denver and Los Angeles markets in the future.
Boost by Wrapify will provide delivery operators with a new transit media revenue stream. Wrapify is wrapping Kiwibot’s “Kiwibots” (autonomous robots) in Gong ads, while measuring OOH effectiveness and retargeting the audiences exposed to these bots online. Wrapify CEO James Heller says this is the first time advertising on robots has been turned into a scalable and measurable ad channel for brands.
Boost was initially developed to bring attribution reporting, data visualization, and multi-channel retargeting capabilities to transit outdoor advertising. But with autonomous bots on the rise, and the industry in flux due to Covid-19, Wrapify’s executives thought the time was right to put Boost to work in an even more creative way. With Kiwibot’s robotic delivery services in place, the teams at Wrapify, Gong, and Kiwibot are hoping to provide brands with true contactless delivery.
While this latest pilot campaign is launching today, this isn’t the first time Gong and Wrapify have worked together. Gong Chief Marketing Officer Udi Ledergor says the two companies have partnered before to “hijack conference traffic” with innovative OOH advertising.
“Gong and Wrapify first partnered last year for a campaign involving 20 cars hovering around the Moscone Center in San Francisco during Dreamforce to amplify Gong’s Revenue Intelligence category launch,” Ledergor says. “When Wrapify approached us a few months ago to gauge our interest in a pilot with Kiwibot, we instantly agreed.”
Although some of the details of the new campaign are still being worked out, Ledergor says the idea is to bridge his company’s account-based marketing approach with a real-world experience. He also believes the revenue stream from advertisers will provide a boost to the autonomous delivery industry, making it more feasible for wide deployment on a faster schedule.
“Our intent is to meet our target audience wherever they are — ordering food to their homes or playing a round of golf,” he says. “We want to surprise them with a touch of originality with this brand awareness campaign.”
Ledergor believes this will be a great way to cut through the noise of what most advertisers are doing. The goal for this new campaign isn’t so much to change the way people receive food or product deliveries in the immediate future, so much as it’s about exploring new frontiers of engaging advertising for the gig economy.
“Simply put, it hasn’t been done before,” Ledergor says. “In a year when out-of-home advertising is a challenge, to say the least, this new medium provides a surprising new way for brands to engage with their audiences.”
2020 has become the year of identifying new opportunities for innovation and pushing boundaries, says Wrapify’s Heller. He says Wrapify is the only adtech company currently encompassing all of the features that turn a fleet’s moving OOH ad placement into digital and physical retargeting with full attribution and measurement, and he sees this move as the first step to creating an entirely new category of OOH, in which bots are used to serve high-recall, street-level media.
“The future of autonomous bot delivery will be ad supported,” Heller says. “It makes delivery for the consumer cheaper, and it provides brands with an impressive new way to reach their audience.”
Stephanie Miles is a senior editor at Street Fight.
