Instant Messenger or Instant Advertiser?

Shadow2097 writes: "ABC News is running this moderately disturbing story about a new, highly targeted form of advertising. Two companies, SmarterChild.com and ActiveBuddy.com have teamed up to deliver interactive Instant Messenger bots that talk to children and deliver ever-so-subtle ads for various products. Just when you think market saturation has reached the limit, leave it to a greedy corporation to start targeting the most naive and vulnerable demographic there is."

Comments

SmarterChild.com IS ActiveBuddy.com

[Tazzy531]

They are the same company.

But yea, for my B-school class "Managing Internet Technology and the Venture Capital Process" midterm, the professor had ActiveBuddy come give us their pitch and presentation. We had to analyze the company and decide whether or not we, as VCs, would invest in them.

My analysis was that the market was not big enough for VCs to invest in ActiveBuddy.com. Direct IM advertising and information bots is still a rather unproven technology; there is no evidence that direct IM advertising or even IM information retrieval (movie time, directions, etc) will ever be profitable. In addition, part of their business is to provide a professional service to other companies to build info-bots. The problem with this is that unlike software, info-bots are rather customized to the client needs. It's not a build once, sell many product. If so much time must be spent on each client, it cuts into their profit margins. Lastly, it is always dangerous to build an entire company around a third party network/product. AOL could easily just say that it doesn't like ActiveBuddy anymore and block all their connections. The company would be out of business [BTW: I got an A+]

On another note, I remember seeing SmarterChild being a huge fad when it first appeared. I had realized that not only was it a intelligent bot, but it was also tracking all conversations you have with the bot and recording your SN. In the same way that you wouldn't want to give your SN to a spammer, you shouldn't provide the bot with your SN. One of these days, it's going to use that massive list of SNs and "spam" your SN.