Kik has kicked its monetization efforts into high gear with a new partner services division dedicated to helping brands and content publishers connect to its highly engaged userbase of teens and young millennials.
The Waterloo, Ont.-based social network claims to have twice as many global active users as Snapchat, at roughly 200 million. And those users are young and attractive to marketers — 70% of them are under 25.
Kik’s already begun experimenting with brand opportunities, having launched two brand products, Promoted Chats and Kik Points. But the new division, called Kik Services, will have a much larger mandate to work with brands and other third-party partners to develop custom content and experiences on the back of its comprehensive open API framework.
Josh Jacobs, a former global CEO of Omnicom agency Accuen who was recruited to run Kik Services, says the new L.A.-based division is looking to create “a new creative canvas that’s more challenging, but also unbelievably more powerful for brands.” He says there’s a lot of opportunity for brands to drive deep engagement with young users at scale with the experiences that Kik’s API supports, and the network’s commitment to user-driven interactions.
The original Kik bot receives nearly 2 million messages a day
Kik’s secret to winning teens’ attention (and the budgets of big brands that want to reach them) has been its unique focus on one-to-one connections, not just between users, but between users and stuff they’re fans of. Kik’s recent foray into monetization, Promoted Chats, created chat channels where individuals can talk back and forth with brands just like any other users. Of course it wouldn’t be possible for a brand community manager to manage thousands of individual chats with fans — so Kik has revived and revamped a tool as old as the internet: chatbots.
Kik’s goofy bots tell jokes, respond to users in a conversational (if stilted) way, and in the case of brands, send content in response to keywords. And kids love them: more than 10 million users have had a conversation with a brand on Kik, exchanging over 250 million messages and that’s just with 70 partner brands in the first year Promoted Chats has been avialable. So far none of those brands have caught up to the original Kik chatbot, which receives nearly 2 million messages every day, but each one of those chats helps Kik learn a little bit more about how to engage its users.
Other social networks targeting the same demographic, like Snapchat and Instagram, have tried to solve the problem of scale by creating broadcast channels that distribute content to a large audience. Jacobs says Kik stands out from that crowd because it creates a unique experience for each user, driven by their own interactions.
“Part of what’s so attractive to me about Kik is that it’s a marketing platform that’s based not on exposure, but on fostering a longterm relationship between any two entities that are chatting,” he says.
After working for so long in advertising and media buying, he says Kik’s non-intrusive approach to brand messaging was refreshing. “The ball’s in your court. We can facilitate an opportunity for you to build relationships with people, but you have to be relevant, you have to bring content,” he says. “But if you do that, you have this amazing new scaled platform that has so much more value than merely adorning content with advertising.”
Kik provided a lighthouse example of the kind of scalable relationship-building it can do with a stunt in March for the release of Insidious 3. Kik worked with Focus Features and agency Massively to design a bot that would mimic the main character of the film, who’s stuck in bed with two broken legs. Users that chatted with the character, Quinn, would get increasingly intense messages over the course of two days, as she freaked out about an apparent haunting.
Publishers like Funny or Die, BuzzFeed and the Washington Post have also found the platform effective for reaching young audiences. Funny or Die’s bot shares exclusive content based on keywords chatters use, like “Justin Bieber.”
Jacobs says the next generation of Kik’s brand platform is going to build on two things it’s learned from its past work with publishers and brands. “One is, how do you build complex interactive relationships with communities,” he says, “and two is how do you get those communities connecting with each other and building different activity around those services.”
