32 million drug-related questions and answers on MSN Messenger

The challenge: Teenagers live in a digital world - how do we communicate with them?

The Home Office, Department of Health and Department for Children, Families and Schools manage the FRANK drugs advice and information service. As the great majority of teenagers already knew, liked and trusted FRANK, we wanted them to experience FRANK as a source of information and support by encouraging stronger interaction with the brand. The problem was that teenagers were no longer spending a lot of time on the phone or meeting face to face with their friends. They were spending the majority of their time chatting on instant messaging services such as MSN.

The strategy: Talk to them in a space they trust

i-level worked with MSN, to create our solution - the FRANK Bot, a software program that mimics the way a human responds to natural language questions, so that it feels like you’re talking to a person. The bot can be downloaded to your buddy list as a new "friend" on MSN. Visible as an icon, it represents a mine of encyclopedic information about drugs. This was the first time that this technology had ever been used for a service like FRANK.

It presented a simple and effective way for teenagers to find out all they needed to know about drugs so that they could make an informed choice and influence each other in a positive way.

The results: Millions of conversations

Almost 350,000 people have downloaded the Bot asking an average of 12 questions and answers each. This works out to a total of 2.7 million conversations and almost 32 million questions and answers so far. Each user has used the Bot seven times on average, spending around three minutes each time.