Building brands? Try messaging apps

Anub Nayyar

Be smart and nonintrusive for consumers to truly engage with your brand.

This is the general advice of Viber’s Anub Nayyar, head of business development in Southeast Asia, to businesses that are looking to leverage messaging apps for their marketing efforts.

“It’s not about plastering the application with ads. It’s about providing users with something useful in terms of convenience, and doing it in a fun and engaging manner,” says Nayyar. “These are our basic guidelines whenever we work with brands.”

An example of Viber’s branded content are stickers, which Nayyar says are extremely popular among Filipinos. Their most recent innovation are “clickable” stickers, which link users to wherever brands wish to direct them.

“It’s an opt-in service, so users have a choice whether to click on it or not,” says Nayyar.

Another example Nayyar gives is Viber’s work with Knorr using artificial intelligence, or bots.

“Depending on the ingredients you have in your kitchen, the bot tells you what kind of dish you can make,” he says.

And then there are other institutional partners Viber works with, such as banks and airlines. In other markets such as the United States, Nayyar says one can wire money through Viber.

“In Nepal we also offer banking services on the platform. So think about it—with just a click of a button, you can get a copy of your bank statement, or book a flight, all on Viber,” he says. “Our guiding principle when it comes to bots is, it has to be convenient and shortens the time users spend doing what they need to do, or it can just be a fun and engaging activity.”

Here in the Philippines, Nayyar says Viber is already in talks with a few banks to see which services they could offer on the platform. What’s particularly popular among Pinoys, he says, are digital content, such as news items.

In terms of messaging behavior, group chat activity is very high here in the country, as well as multimedia messaging.

Nayyar clarifies, though, that while Viber looks at these broad messaging trends, security remains one of the platform’s top priorities, and messages are secure because of end-to-end encryption. Therefore, no data is leaked, not even to partner brands.

“We have brands that ask us, can you tell us what people are talking about, what images they are sharing so we can target them? The answer is no—we don’t do it, and we can’t do it because of the end-to-end encryption,” he says.