Basketball HOFer Gary Payton for the NBA Finals has teamed up with menswear brand DXL for an in-game chatbot experience that combines his "legendary offline personality with online commentary to talk basketball and fashion," according to Marty Swant of ADWEEK. The bot’s called "Trash Talk With Gary Payton" and was built by S.F.-based developer GameOn, which has created bots for brands like SI and Live Nation. The experience "gives users the latest news, hot takes, scores and other content like live videos during games." It also "includes GIFs of Payton’s emoji, plenty of promotional messages and links for the retailer, and of course, some trash talk along the way." He has been using the bot to "provide live commentary both in the form of text and videos." Payton, an investor in GameOn, "first heard of it last year through the rapper E-40." To decide what to use for the bot, Payton and GameOn "went through old footage of his time on the court to see what some of his taunting back then entailed." Payton said that GameOn "wanted to make sure that chatbot Gary was family-friendly." Since launching a few weeks ago, it has "already found an audience." GameOn CEO Alex Beckman said that the bot has "25,000 daily active users." Those users are "split evenly between Facebook and Skype, with the rest mostly coming" from messaging app Kik. However, Beckman said that Kik’s users have "five times the engagement seen on other platforms." The campaign is a first for DXL. In the basketball banter, Payton’s bot "sometimes sends links to DXL’s website or asks if the user wants more information." But it sometimes "comes across as forced, which takes away from the fluidity of the sports talk" (ADWEEK.com, 6/10).
