By Chuck Martin
Artificial intelligence is growing in advertising.
Lufthansa is launching an AI-powered, interactive ad experience for potential travelers to interact with the airline for general questions and travel content across 15 European destinations.
A “destination explorer” showcases each location with local travel facts and tips, tailored image galleries, videos and options for flight reservations.
The AI-ads are part of Lufthansa’s #SayYesToTheWorld brand campaign, which includes digital, out-of-home, mobile, print, social and cinema ads.
The interactive ad units, powered by IBM Watson, include natural language understanding, which analyzes text to extract information from content, such as concepts, entities, keywords, categories, sentiment, emotion, relations and semantic roles.
The Watson artificial intelligence engine has most recently been used in an interactive ad campaign by Lego.
In the Lufthansa implementation, a conversation can start with the AI ad inviting a consumer to interact with the unit with a question, such as “Where in the world would you pause time?” “Is somewhere else always the right place?” or “what language makes the world sound the most beautiful?” according to the ad campaign announcement.
Once engaged, the ad can respond with a relevant travel fact and prompt the traveler to explore the city or get more travel facts in order to keep the conversation flowing.
Consumers can ask questions such as how many cities Lufthansa flies to or even something more general, like “tell me about Frankfurt.”
The AI ad is running on weather.com, The Weather Channel app and across Lufthansa’s digital advertising ecosystem.
AI is raising the bar for what an ad can deliver. Though consumers may not be aware that artificial intelligence is being used in an ad, they are likely to start noticing the increased relevance of an ad that provides what they’re looking for at any given moment.
