IBM's Watson computer system, powered by IBM POWER7, competes against Jeopardy!’s two most successful and celebrated contestants -- Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter -- in a practice match held during a press conference at IBM's Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY on January 13, 2011. Watson will compete against Jennings and Rutter in the first-ever man vs. machine Jeopardy! competition, which will air on February 14, 15 and 16, 2011, with two matches being played over three consecutive days.
Thanks to Hollywood, people are afraid of robots. HAL, Megatron, The Terminator (sometimes) – often, when we tell stories about robots, these are narratives of hubris. Humans play God, and their creations turn against them, try to take over the world, and generally wreak havoc.
That's a challenge when you're a company building artificial intelligence technology – or the ad agency working with that company.
Recently, Ogilvy and Mather has been working with IBM on this very challenge. Dan Ng, the agency's worldwide planning director, described the challenge at the FutureFlash ad industry conference on Thursday.
"How do we get people not to be afraid of this cognitive ability that's going to be built into everything?" Mr. Ng said of his agency's mission.
IBM's Jeopardy!-winning supercomputer, Watson, has been on a bit of a PR tear in recent years, attempting to show the consumer public that artificial intelligence can be creative, and friendly.
Recently, Ogilvy took this campaign a step forward, by taking on that Hollywood stereotype of the human-hating robot, on Hollywood's biggest night: the Oscars. It launched an ad during the Academy Awards broadcast featuring Carrie Fisher leading a support group for outdated robots – those not interested in working with humans.
The message of the ads is that "Watson isn't here to dominate us, Watson is here to work with us," Mr. Ng said.
During the same broadcast, another ad featured director Ridley Scott speaking with Watson about how images are used in storytelling – and how Watson can analyse images.
The Ridley Scott ad was an extension of a larger "Watson and me" campaign featuring stars such as Bob Dylan [who heard how Watson was analyzing his song lyrics] and Serena Williams, who learned from Watson's analysis that she performs best when she lags her opponent by one point. The Oscar campaign alone led to a 263 per cent increase in traffic to ibm.com/watson, Mr. Ng said.
Watson's next project? Attempting to create a hit record. The agency still isn't sure whether it's going to work, but it's all part of a larger project to combat people's natural prejudices against artificial intelligence, through marketing – and sell its data analysis capabilities to potential clients.
"We want to show a computer that can understand the human data we've collected ... and use it to communicate better for brands," Mr. Ng said.