JPMorgan Says Robots Beat Don Draper in Writing Credit Card Ads

(Bloomberg) -- Robots aren’t just trading on Wall Street, now they’re persuading consumers to sign up for credit cards.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. said Tuesday it signed a five-year contract with Persado Inc., a firm that develops artificial intelligence for creating marketing messages. The deal follows a pilot program where JPMorgan saw its click-through rates on ads jump by as much as 450% with the robot’s creative.

“Machine learning is the path to more humanity in marketing,” Kristin Lemkau, the chief marketing officer of the biggest U.S. bank, said in a statement. “Persado’s technology is incredibly promising. It rewrote copy and headlines that a marketer, using subjective judgment and their experience, likely wouldn’t have. And they worked.”

Don Draper and his fellow “Mad Men” might be no match for their robot rivals: Persado’s system taps into a database of more than 1 million words and phrases to persuade consumers. Lemkau said the Persado marketing deal is “just the beginning,” and could be used in JPMorgan’s internal communications and customer service prompts.

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