The holiday shopping season is an intensely competitive, make-or-break period for most businesses, and Verizon is no exception. With virtually every company vying for customer attention, Verizon needed to create an innovative and enjoyable shopping experience to break through the clutter.

Brief: Create a fun and innovative experience to make holiday shopping more enjoyable.

Objective: Increase 2018 Q4 sales, specifically around account growth.

Emojis aren’t just emotional anymore. They can be logical, too. Send Verizon’s Emoji Shopping Assistant a message with five emojis describing your recipient, and get recommendations for the best gifts to match.

Despite the holidays being the most anticipated time of the year, 69% of Americans would give up holiday gifting if they could. Holiday shopping can be overwhelming, exasperating and tedious, and more and more people are turning to social media for gifting inspiration.

Messaging has become a primary mode of communication globally, with 80% of adults messaging daily. And across eight global markets surveyed by Facebook Insights, 56% of people have sent messages consisting only of emojis. This trend, combined with the exponential increase in consumer-business messaging (8 billion messages being exchanged between them each month, a year-over-year quadrupling of volume) made Facebook Messenger the perfect platform to directly interact with customers.

Customers 18+ across a broad national target were driven to the Messenger experience on Facebook and Instagram, and encouraged to interact with the chatbot.

We created a Facebook Messenager chatbot using artificial intelligence to turn emojis into gift recommendations. Holiday shoppers could find the perfect holiday gift options simply by describing the person they were shopping for in five emojis. Based on the emojis provided, the AI would then “guess” what sort of person was described and recommend a gift that matched their interests, whether travel, photography, tech...

- 750,000+ users reached

- 390,000 messages exchanged in only two weeks

- +356% shopper traffic from social compared to 2017

- 90% completion rate in the first 48 hours

- 4.29% CTR to the product page on verizonwireless.com