Watson’s Gig on Jeopardy! Helps IBM Reboot Brand
The data analytics engine Watson may have beat Jeopardy champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in February, but the real winner was IBM.
The appearance of Watson on the game show was part of a rebranding effort for Big Blue, noted Jim Gargan, IBM vice president of demand programs. But the intention wasn’t to show how much smarter the machine was than man but rather how far man had come.
\“At the beginning, we set a tone. This wasn’t about man versus machine, but rather about the advancement of mankind,” Gargan said at the DMA’s All for One conference earlier this week. “We wanted people to vote for Watson, not against him.”
One purpose of Watson’s appearance was to play up the firm’s capabilities in artificial intelligence and analytics, and highlight its overall “Smarter Planet” campaign about solving community and environmental issues.
The other was to promote IBM to younger people who may lack knowledge of the company—which re-branded itself in the 1990s into a software and services company away from the computer hardware giant it had been for many years, said Brian Fetherstonhaugh, chairman/CEO of OgilvyOne Worldwide, IBM’s agency.
IBM promoted the Jeopardy event through print advertising, TV spots on the NFL playoffs, YouTube videos and “watch parties” organized through Twitter and Facebook.
The shows—broadcast Feb. 14-16—were among Jeopardy’s highest-rated, with 34.5 million viewers, and secured for IBM 1.3 billion impressions and $50 million in earned media. Gargan said the Watson campaign produced $260 million in pipeline business and $37 million in business closed to date.
The Jeopardy appearance was effectively the culmination of a long effort to re-establish the IBM brand.
“If you look at the last 20 years of IBM [it’s a story of] adversity, recovery and setting new heights,” Fetherstonhaugh said. “When Fortune puts you on the cover as a tyrannosaurus rex that’s not good.”
“When Lou Gerstner came in the 1990s he discovered a solution to his positioning: he started to get the business model together and turned IBM into a software and services company and we started to turn it around,” he added.
Right now, Watson s working with Columbia University and the University of Baltimore to assist with medical diagnoses and suggest treatments. Gargan noted IBM may also try to use Watson for financial services, traffic control or call centers.
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