The first AI jury
Belgian Association of Marketing (BAM)
Issue 45 | December 2017
Agency
DDB Brussels
Creative Team
Creative Directors Peter Ampe, Odin Saillé Concept Sara West, Silke Beurms Copywriter Kenn Van Lijsebeth Design Sven Verfaille
Production Team
AI Development Faction XYZ Head of Machine Learning Jos Polfliet Chief Technology Officer Joeri Van Steen Video Indexer Service Microsoft Program Manager Cognitive Services Microsoft Milan Gada Animation Dividebyfour 3D director Maarten Baert Lead 3D artist Rik De Lausnay Voice Recording Raygun Voice “Pearl” Lucy Akhurst
Other Credits
Strategic Planner Jorian Vanvossel Business Director Francis Lippens Account Producer Maria-Laura Laubenthal Digital Producer Stefanie Warreyn PR Kenn Van Lijsebeth
Date
September 2017
Background
Advertising had become obsessed with Artifical Intelligence. Vast quantities of data could be transformed into real insights about human behaviour. When machine learning was applied to digital information, undeniably powerful tools emerged from the work.
In Belgium, the organisers of the annual MIXX Awards wondered if AI could make judging fairer?
Idea
To celebrate its 10th anniversary, the MIXX Awards commissioned Pearl, named after Radia Perlman, the prominent female Internet pioneer.
Pearl was given the task of giving the first-ever award based on AI understanding of what makes a winner.
She was fed with every international MIXX case study of the last decade and given three months to analyse the texts, videos, results and even the case study music. Surely she was the most experienced advertising juror on the planet.
Having taught herself to think like humans, Pearl reached an accuracy level of about 76% within those three months. In other words, if she was fed a new case, she was pretty good at being able to predict whether it would be a winner or not, and even what sort of award, gold, silver or bronze.
Pearl did not have the flaws of human jurors, able to give every case the same level of attention, without friends to defend or a network or country to promote.
There were clear signs that AI will help award shows in the future. For example, with pre-judging, where good campaigns can occasionally be overlooked.
Results
The learnings from Pearl were that quantitative metrics were important in any submission. Shares were worth more than media impressions. Being mentioned by the BBC or CNN gave credibility to a case. Upbeat music was so overused it could count against a submission while the use of a voice-over to tell the story had a positive effect on the outcome.
The most successful campaigns gave credit to 25% more suits than less successful ideas.
Our Thoughts
For her Grand Prix, Pearl chose JWT Brussel's "Her Street View" for NGO Touche Pas A Ma Pote, as did the human jury. Phewf!