Challenge:  Turn a game into serious Commercial Payback.

In February 2011 an IBM system named Watson competed on the US TV Quiz Show Jeopardy!   Against the two best players of all time.

A lot was at stake.

Could the machine compete?  Jeopardy! is a game of words: hard enough for humans, exquisitely difficult for computers.

Would people watch?  Jeopardy!’s ratings had been declining for years.

How would people react?  If a computer beats a human, fears of Skynet and HAL are never far away.

And most importantly, would businesses understand the applications of this new technology enough to make this a commercial success for IBM?

Our Idea:  Make Humanity The Winner · We created an Owned- and Earned- media-focused campaign to publicize, surround and extend the broadcast, ensuring Watson became a pop-culture phenomenon.

· We designed an on-stage ‘Avatar’ for Watson to give the audience a window into its experience, its confidence in answers, and perhaps even its emotions.  Something to root for on stage.

· We documented the human back-story in 22 films, focusing on the team of IBMers who brought Watson to the world – their highs, their lows, but always their progress.

· We explained the human benefits that will come when Watson’s technology enables us to make sense of our world’s floods of data.  In medicine, where no doctor can keep up with the growth of medical knowledge.  Or in patent research, finance, or law.

· And we drove IBM’s business, with demand generation activities merchandizing not just the future technology of Watson, but the currently available hardware it ran on.

Watson became a true phenomenon.  We drove Jeopardy!’s highest ratings in years, 10,000 press articles, 5,700 TV features, $50MM in earned media value.  Which created 70% public awareness and forged a cultural icon:  the 2011 Webby ‘Person of the Year’.

And IBM reaped the benefits.  Thousands of leads.  A turnaround in sales of their POWER line of servers.  A future Watson business predicted to be a billion dollars per year.  And in the meantime, sales of currently available hardware, software and services amounting to over a quarter billion dollars in their own right.  Just those sales (which aren’t even of Watson) gave the campaign an ROI of 23x.

So when Watson won, so did Humanity.  And in its own way, so too did IBM.