Watching TV with an AI companion makes people like ads more, similar to what happens when they watch with another person, according to a paper published in the Journal of Advertising Research.
The paper comprised two studies, one investigating whether co-viewing with an AI companion was ‘comparable to watching alongside a human partner’ — which it was — and another examining whether having longer interactions with chatbots changed people’s attitudes towards them.
In the second study, 70 participants watched a six-minute clip of American football and three 30-second food adverts (for Oreos, Doritos, and Papa John’s pizza) in a lab made to look like a ‘cosy living room’.
All the participants wore a galvanic skin response device to measure attention arousal as they watched. Half of them were joined by another person (a graduate assistant) in the lab, while the other half were provided with an Amazon Alexa device, which they were told was connected to the TV and processing the content, ‘to create the impression that Alexa was watching TV with them’.
Participants in both conditions were asked to make small talk with their companion for one or three minutes before watching the football. Alexa was programmed to ‘discuss only movies’, and the human companion was trained to mimic Alexa’s communication style.
The results showed that the length of conversation with human companions did nothing to change people’s attitudes towards the ads. But the participants in the Alexa condition consistently showed more arousal and less irritation with the adverts after longer conversations with their AI companion.
Lead author Yongwoog Andy Jeon, assistant professor of marketing in the department of marketing at Northern Illinois University College of Business explained: ‘Co-viewing elicits a sense of shared presence regardless of the nature of the co-viewer: human or AIC [AI companion]; however, prior social interaction matters only for co-viewing with an AIC. We found that longer small talk increases perceived humanness, which in turn reduces ad irritation and boosts ad persuasion. An AIC without prior social interaction does not reliably produce these effects, despite being physically present during viewing.’
Jeon added that the findings ‘do not suggest that households with Alexa- or Echo-like devices will automatically experience these effects if the AI is merely present and silent during viewing’, as the previous social interactions with AI are crucial to the feeling of co-viewing with a companion.
He did add that this can happen naturally with household AI companions: ‘We can easily think of occasions where we naturally have “small talks” before watching content, such as chatting about the teams or recent games before watching football or discussing the storyline, actors, or recommendations in movies or TV shows.’
AI companions, such as chatbots, are widely available to consumers, and some specific watching companions have been released on platforms like Steam and YouTube.
In the paper, the researchers suggest that marketers should be partnering with streaming services to ‘introduce a “Watch Together” mode in which the assistant maintains its character as a fellow viewer, providing unobtrusive background information on the on-screen individuals and the products they use’.
‘How Small Talk and Co-Viewing with AI Companions Boost Advertising Effectiveness and Persuasion: Chat, Watch, and Buy’ by Yongwoog Andrew Jeon, Yuhosua Ryoo, Sangwook Lee & Hye Jin Yoon.
