ITV briefed us to show their audience something new on the live election special Trump vs. Clinton: The Result. We aimed to use AI and social data to go beyond the ‘buzz’ and show what really mattered to US voters and how that affected the vote.

Our solution was EagleAi – an AI platform that analysed a billion social posts, 15 million news articles, 24 speeches and 3 debates, and presented back an unbiased analysis. Our creative goal was to show viewers how AI could read a massive data-set and derive a human-like understanding on the candidates’ personalities, their supporters’ confidence and the issues that mattered to voters.

EagleAi’s findings were designed into simple data visualisations for discussion by the studio panel, and offered ITV viewers a unique level of insight and clear story: a wildcard candidate achieving a shock result by focussing on core issues: jobs, immigration and terror.

EagleAi was built in three weeks using an experience design process built around TV viewers. All visualisations were designed to fit into a letterbox between channel logos and news tickers and were simple enough to be interpreted by viewers in five seconds, since the Director would cut to the studio and trust viewers to remember the point.

EagleAi used Netbase for social data (a billion Tweets, Instagrams and Facebook posts) and analysed voting intent and key issues using custom Natural Language Classifiers. Focussing on declared voters using signals like #imwithher and #makeamericagreatagain gave EagleAi a map of key issues and voting intent based on 12 million individual voters after bots and news sources were cleansed. We also analysed candidate personalities (Watson Personality Insights) and supporter confidence (Watson Tone Analyser).

The result was a coherent experience that was unique to ITV viewers, who saw EagleAi explain what was happening and why.

On the night of the election ITV viewers enjoyed a unique additional perspective alongside the usual pundits and guests. EagleAi provided an unbiased, data-powered insight into the candidates, their supporters and the overwhelming effectiveness of Trump’s messages in getting out the vote.

EagleAi’s achievement in seeing what no pollster had predicted subsequently saw the platform featured on ITV Lunchtime News and in Campaign, PR Week, The Drum and Fast Company.

We have been invited to apply similar insight and predictive power in health, retail and (again) in politics and AI-driven insight is now a fundamental part of our offering. The ability to understand what people feel, why they feel it and what they might do as a result is incredibly powerful for any brand or client.

EagleAi has played an interactive role in new business wins exceeding two million dollars since the election.