Can artificial intelligence make awards judging fairer in the future?

To explore the boundaries of this thought, we introduced PEARL, the first AI jury experiment.

Named after Radia Perlman - a prominent female internet pioneer - PEARL is an AI jury experiment that distilled and quantified data from 10 years of Mixx-award show entries, allowing her to predict award show success with a 76% chance ratio.

It allowed her to make her own judgement as a separate jury during the 2018 Belgian MIXX awards show and prove how she compared against – and next to - human judgement.

- Development of AI & Machine learning (as from June 16th)

We gathered over 10 years of entries from the last decade of MIXX awards and their respective results.

Under supervision of Faction XYZ, a Belgian partner specialized in machine learning, PEARL was given 3 months to analyse the data, making her the most experienced advertising jury on the planet.

- 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.

- Call for entries (September 18th)

At the same time we launched the call for entries (via newsletter) to agencies, promoting the chance to be judged by world’s first AI judge as well.

- 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.

In Belgium over 150 cases were entered to be judged by PEARL, growing the amount of entries by 10% compared to the previous year.

As an AI-experiment created to raise a debate about the future of advertising award shows, PEARL stroke a chord with our core audience: professionals within the advertising world. Internationally, PEARL gained attention from specialised press as Adforum, Campaign UK, l’ADN, and AdWeek (who hoped PEARL would “get it really, really wrong” - http://www.adweek.com/creativity/does-PEARL-the-first-a-i-ad-awards-juror-know-a-thing-about-creativity/), reaching over 14 million advertising professionals worldwide.

Last but not least, at the Mixx-awards, we let PEARL announce the first winner of the AI-award. Being 76% accurate, she picked one of the same winners the human jury already awarded that night.

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.