PEARL

TitlePEARL
BrandBELGIAN ASSOCIATION OF MARKETING
Product/ServiceMIXX AWARDS
Category A07. Financial Products & Services, Commercial Public Services, B2B Products & Services
Entrant DDB BRUSSELS, BELGIUM
Idea Creation DDB BRUSSELS, BELGIUM
PR DDB BRUSSELS, BELGIUM
Production DDB BRUSSELS, BELGIUM
Credits
Name Company Position
Peter Ampe DDB Brussels Creative Director
Odin Saille DDB Brussels Creative Director
Francis Lippens DDB Brussels Business Director
Sara West DDB Brussels Concept provider
Silke Beurms DDB Brussels Copywriter
Stefanie Warreyn DDB Brussels Head of digital production
Maria-Laura Laubenthal DDB Brussels Producer
Kenn Van Lijsebeth DDB Brussels Copywriter
Jorian Vanvossel DDB Brussels Strategic Planner
Sven Verfaille DDB Brussels Designer
Jos Polfliet Faction XYZ Head of Machine Learning
Joeri Van Steen Faction XYZ Chief Technology Officer
Milan Gada Microsoft Program Manager Cognitive Services
Maarten Baert Dividebyfour 3D director
Rik De Lausnay Dividebyfour Lead 3D artist
Gabriel Hennessy Dividebyfour Houdini artist
Peter Baert Raygun Managing Partner - Composer
Lucy Akhurst Raygun Actress

The Campaign

Could artificial intelligence make awards judging fairer in the future? Introducing Pearl, the first AI jury experiment. This first AI experiment on judging will investigate if creativity is measurable and how AI might be able to help the judging system. Named after Radia Perlman, one of the prominent female internet pioneers, the result is Pearl. Pearl was fed with all international MIXX case studies from the last decade and given 3 months to analyse the texts, videos, results and even music, making her surely the most experienced advertising jury on the planet. Pearl uses state-of-the-art technology to learn from all of those cases and make her own prediction as jury member of the award show.

Execution

1. Development of Artificial Intelligence & Machine learning (as from June 16th) To be able to give Pearl the necessary time to analyse all cases and learn to predict future success, development started as early as June. 2. Online video & press releases: Launch of the first AI jury experiment (September 18th) We first spread the word about Pearl by contacting local and international advertising media outlets. Pearl certainly didn’t miss her entry: AdWeek ignited the debate by hoping that her judging result would be it “really, really wrong”. 3. Call for entries (September 18th) At the same time we launched the call for entries (via direct mail) promoting the chance to be judged by world’s first AI judge as well. 4. Award show and reveal (October 10th) One month later we revealed the regular winners of the MIXX awards ànd the first winner of the AI award.

Reaching over 14 million advertising professionals, Pearl raised a debate about the future of creative judging: For example, in larger competitions she can be helpful in pre-judging to avoid that good campaigns get overlooked. She isn’t there to replace human judgement, but she can keep an extra eye out for them. Pearl is 76% accurate: She still has room for improvement as she needs to be able to better recognize humour for example. But Pearl has already proven helpful in for example detecting original combinations to look for creativity. Out of 150 MIXX Award entries, Pearl picked the same winner as the human jury did. Proving that AI can be helpful as an additional tool for award show judges: she never grows tired, never loses attention and doesn’t have friends to defend or a country or network to promote. In the future, we hope to let Pearl assist human judges in other award shows as well.

The Situation

Pearl is an AI jury experiment which distilled and quantified data from over 30.000 award show entries. Created to raise a debate about the future of award judging, we used the right media outlets to not only reach as many advertising professionals as possible but get them to think about it as well. By the time the campaign ended we reached over 14 million industry professionals and appeared in all top advertising media outlets, free of charge.

The Strategy

As an AI experiment created to raise a debate about the future of advertising award shows, Pearl strikes a chord with our core audience: professionals within the advertising world. We made sure to spread the word about Pearl to both local and international peers focusing mainly on owned and earned media known by the advertising world such as MediaMarketing, Pub (both of them Belgian magazines) and the likes of AdWeek (who hoped Pearl would get it really, really wrong).