The Cognitive Dress
IBM had a problem. The only time people saw the tech giant’s logo was on receipt printers.
But IBM’s technology is everywhere, we just can’t see it.
So how can we make the brand culturally relevant again?
By putting its AI on the biggest red carpet in culture: The Met Gala.
Press:
WIRED | Fast Company | Refinery29 | CBS News | Google Arts & Culture | Forbes | Glossy | The | Cut | Racked | Business Insider | Henry Ford Museum | Quartz | wwd | Medium | Engadget | Adweek | Adage
The theme of the 2016 Met Gala was Manus x Machina: Man and Machine in the Age of Fashion.
We paired fashion house Marchesa with IBM Watson (IBM’s AI) to create the world’s first dress that reacts to real-time social commentary.
IBM data scientists fed Watson massive amounts of data about Marchesa and fashion, then Watson returned with design suggestions based on its analysis.
Once designed and on the red carpet, the dress changed colors based averaged social sentiments from Twitter and Instagram: blue represented excitement, lavender for joy, red for love, green for envy and yellow for curiosity.
We gave fashion fans around the word a platform to express their voices at fashion’s most exclusive event.
It was the most successful activation in IBM’s 109 year history.
The results:
Highest engagement in IBM history.
352 million earned social media impressions.
Exceeded Instagram brand metrics by 117%.
75% share of conversation over Apple (16%), Samsung (6%), Google (3%), and Intel (1%).
95% positive social sentiment.
49K+ mentions.
