04 May 2018

#GoTBot chatbot awards

Winter is coming, and we're buzzing from our recent awards success.

Our friendly Game of Thrones Facebook Messenger chatbot was designed to help guide fans through the series and we couldn’t be more chuffed that it’s been recognised for it’s innovation and creative use of AI technology.

GoTBoT has won numerous awards and commendations including;

Shorty Awards
- Silver Award in the "Humour Category"
- "Audience Award", a real honour to get this one

Social Buzz Awards
- Commendation for "Best Use of a Chatbot"

DADI Awards
- Commendation for "Viral Campaign"
- Commendation for "In-House Campaign"

In a world of direwolves, white walkers and dragons, there’s one thing missing: bots! Meet GoTBot, a friendly Facebook chatbot with answers to all of your Game of Thrones questions.

We created GoTBot as a Facebook Messenger chatbot in solidarity with all the secondary characters you forgot about, plus all the titles and heirs that you never knew existed. It’s for those of you who realise that, in fact, you know nothing.

Start a conversation with GoTBot in the Facebook Messenger app and ask it a question about any Game of Thrones character. For example, “Who is Varys?” will result in a photo of Varys, his title and all sorts of other juicy information about the Master of Whisperers. The “Dead or Alive” feature will come in handy when you just can’t remember if that one forgotten Tully is dead yet.

But don’t underestimate GoTBot… It knows more than you expect. Just try asking about Daenerys and Jon Snow’s (possible? probable?) relationship. Everyone’s entitled to their Game of Thrones theories...

It all started from a simple “Dead or Alive” Game of Thrones question around the studio. If only there was someone who had all the answers. Wait a minute....

GoTBot is designed as a useful tool, but it quickly grew into an entertaining digital friend. Popular Google searches related to Game of Thrones shaped GoTBot so that he answers the most pressing questions, but is also learning every day through the magic of AI.

The A.I. of natural language processing of GoTBot is handled by the Wit.ai service. We begin by teaching Wit.ai example questions and, as we feed it information, it learns to understand the users intent. When the user asks a question, Wit.ai recognises the intent of what the user is searching for then our vast GoT database gets to work and answers the user in an intelligent and useful manner as possible, with a bit of humour thrown in to keep it interesting.

Discussing the launch, Catch’s Founder and Managing Director, Jonathan Smith said:

"With 1.2 billion monthly active users on Facebook Messenger, the potential audience for chatbots is huge. We knew we wanted to create a Facebook chatbot and wanted to get our clients excited about the future of AI and how it might benefit their business. What better way to do so than creating our very own chatbot? And who doesn’t like Game of Thrones?”

GoTBot's popularity is growing, he's already been featured on Mashable, The Verge, AdWeek, Creativity and Esquire magazine.

To meet GoTBot - The Game of Thrones Chatbot, visit him on Facebook http://m.me/G0TB0T

Related news and work

Game of Thrones chatbot

Catch

Meet the multi-award winning GoTBot, a friendly Facebook chatbot with answers to all of your Game of Thrones questions

CR7 Challenge

Cristiano Ronaldo Fragrances

What better way of getting fans excited than with a challenge from Cristiano Ronaldo himself?

Putting the fun back into flying

Thomas Cook Airlines

Putting the fun back into flying via clever content for a UK brand favourite

27 Feb 2017

The Lobster launch campaign

In a dystopian near-future, single people are taken to The Hotel, where they are obliged to find a romantic partner in forty-five days or are transformed into beasts

The Lobster Trailer (2016)

Objective

Picturehouse needed an agency to support with the UK release of The Lobster; a quirky Arthouse Blockbuster with an all-star ensemble cast including Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz, Ben Whishaw, John C. Reilly, Olivia Colman, Lea Seydoux and many more.

The brief was to:

Build intrigue around The Lobster’s unique concept
Draw on the film’s comedic elements, in order to generate social conversations
Establish the release as the next big Arthouse Blockbuster

Approach

To promote this unique and darkly humorous film we focused on the key themes highlighted by the director, allowing us to subtly educate users to the story without giving spoilers, and to build genuine interest and intrigue. We split the campaign into two main sections:

Intrigue

To build interest in the film in the weeks before release we developed a campaign that focused on one key scene; ‘Man Eats Alone’. This scene demonstrates to the characters the potential perils and pitfalls of being single, and generally how much better life is when you are in a couple.

In the world of the film, being single isn’t an option, you are either in a relationship, or you are turned into an animal and released into the woods! We created a series of social assets to be used cross platform that would provide some fun, quirky and occasionally dark examples of propaganda that could appear in public places.

The assets were well received by fans across social channels for the BFI, Film4 and The Lobster, providing a great talking point for social and a place for users to share from and start their own debates around the themes.

Excite

When trying to explain the concept of the film, the thing that really gets a reaction from people is the idea that if you are single you will be taken to a room and changed into an animal. To add to this peril, you also have to choose which animal you would like to be.

To excite cinemagoers we put them in the place of the characters and asked them what they would be if they had to choose. We gave them some help though and created a darkly dangerous quiz that starts off restrained and ends with some evocative questions that really get to the heart of the user's psyche.

Our quiz then recommends which animal you should choose and provides a handy sharing asset allowing you to brag about being a Bear or congratulate yourself on being a Cat.

You can take the quiz here at www.lobsterfilmquiz.co.uk and find out what animal you should be!