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Chef Watson

IBM

Issue 44 | September 2017

Agency

Ogilvy Paris

Creative Team

Executive Creative Director Emmanuel Lallevé Managing Director Emmanuel Ferry Creative Director Susan Westre Copywriter Johan Leborg Art Directors Josiah Jones, Edward Macaulay, Erika Reyes Copywriter Nick Bakshi

Production Team

Production Manager Antoine Bagot Producers Muriel Benitah, Marine Redon Art Buyer Veronique Chalencon Director Tristan Bensaïd

Other Credits

Global Business Director Mary McFarland Business Director Joyce Pucheu Account Manager Margaux Pennes Advertising Manager, IBM Europe Lily Sorbara

Date

May 2017

Background

For many outside IBM's normal audience of technological savvy people, the worlds of Artificial Intelligence and cognitive computing were intimidating.

How could they be reassured that AI, though a complicated concept to grasp, was going to make lives easier and better?

Idea

What better way was there to reach a wider audience than through food, something everybody was interested in?

IBM's Watson, a supercomputer with cognitive computing capabilities, was put to work to assimilate thousands of recipes.

It was then invited to create its own unique recipes. To make it more challenging, Watson was instructed to create recipes with only four ingredients, each of which had to start with the letters E,A,T and S.

The recipes were made visually enticing on social media, and animated GIFs encouraged people to try cognitive cooking for themselves.

IBM's AI supercomputer was challenged to create new recipes from ingredients that only began with the letters E, A, T and S.

Results

80% of the videos/GIFs were watched to the end. CTR was raised at each new EATS post.

Our Thoughts

It's true, the two words 'artificial' and 'intelligence', when combined, do spook people. There are some, Elon Musk among them, who think AI is an existential threat and should be regulated now. In July, Mark Zuckerberg suggested that Musk was "irresponsible".

Recently I was fortunate to listen to the amazing Ray Kurzweil as he suggested that the human brain is simply not able to get any bigger. It is already dangerous for women to have children. With larger brains and larger heads in which to encase them, homo sapiens would risk selecting against itself as a species. There is nowhere else for human intelligence to go than into the cloud, he said.

I happen to be one of those who think AI will make the world a better and safer place. So I give thanks to IBM for this campaign.

It also has an important commercial ambition behind it, since IBM is regarded to be trailing Google and Microsoft in developing AI platforms for its clients.