Title	PEARL
Brand	BELGIAN ASSOCIATION OF MARKETING
Product/Service	MIXX 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

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.

Campaign Success

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.

Describe the success of the promotion with both client and consumer including some quantifiable results

Pearl still has room for improvement but Pearl has already proven helpful in, for example, detecting original combinations to look for creativity. In Belgium over 150 cases were entered to be judged by Pearl. Being 76% accurate, she 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 network to promote. Internationally, we reached over 14 million advertising professionals to raise 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. In the future, we hope to let Pearl assist human judges in other award shows as well.

Explain why the method of promotion was most relevant to the product or service

The MIXX Awards celebrate digital innovation in advertising. For their 10th anniversary they wanted to raise a debate within the advertising world about the future of award judging. To do so we created Pearl, the first AI jury built with one question in mind: Could artificial intelligence make awards judging fairer in the future? We got people discussing the current state of award show judging both locally (Pearl judged all MIXX award entries) and internationally (Pearl was discussed in all major advertising media outlets). As an AI jury experiment, Pearl got us wondering about award show judging in the future.

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). Additionally, Belgian advertising professional had the unique chance to have their case for the MIXX awards judged by the world’s first AI jury as well, on top of the regular jury.