The company has been building the product over the last six months, and tested it with select clients ahead of today’s wider launch. Tinuiti, among the U.S.’ largest independent agencies, is among the first to join the open alpha for ChatEDO. Tinuiti did not provide a comment by press time.
An upsell opportunity for EDO
Of course, processing and giving away reams of data via an AI chatbot isn’t a cost-free endeavor. The company is incurring token usage fees from Anthropic to run ChatEDO, but Krim suggested that expenditures are manageable because EDO’s tech is highly automated and has low variable costs on collecting basic ad intel data.
The bigger bet is that ChatEDO provides an opportunity to get agencies hooked on the insights and buy higher-value data from EDO on audiences, outcomes, and optimization that they can’t access through the chatbot.
Early analysis of user searches on ChatEDO indicates that users are often looking up ads for their brand or its competitors. “The next question after that, often is, ‘Well, what’s performing best?’ And that’s where our outcome measure and our engagement rates come in and really differentiate us,” Krim said. ChatEDO’s response to a question about what’s performing best will likely encourage a user to reach out to an EDO rep to access more data.
“I’m selfishly putting all this data in front of people, but I’m holding back my core product that I sell, which is outcome measurement,” Krim added. “I think it’ll be a really good upsell opportunity.” The additional cloud and token fees spent along the way, he said, are just “a marketing investment.”
In the meantime, EDO’s battle with iSpot is not over yet. Earlier this month, iSpot filed for a permanent injunction, which if granted could potentially bar EDO from certain conduct in the future. EDO plans to appeal the court’s initial ruling.
