ChaptGPT, Google Bard and a raft of others are taking the air out of the room. But where does AI truly need to go next?
It’s been a more than a decade since IBM WATSON beat the best JEOPARDY! champions on TV. When some of the original Watson research team reconstituted as Elemental Cognition a few years later, they asked for a brand campaign that stood them apart from “everyday” AI.
EC’s processes and approach to machine learning goes well beyond systems that help write résumés or optimize a supply chain—they are aiming for machines that know us and partner with us to get things done.
The evolution of Verizon’s successful Ready B2B campaign. We aimed to change perceptions of Verizon from “the phone company” to a true partner to Small and Medium Business, the Public Sector and Enterprise customers. Through TV, OLV, Print, Digital and Social, the emphasis is on authenticity, with real Verizon engineers and employees, iconic photography and a playful tone.
“So what do I do with my money?” is a thought-leadership campaign in digital and print aimed at investors, financial advisors and employees to show there is opportunity with a firm that is risk-averse but clear-eyed about the opportunities for investment growth. It’s the question on everyone’s lips after historic upheavals in the global economy, stalled and falling markets, and shattered investor confidence.
"What is WATSON?" It's 1 million Tweets. Three nights trending during TV prime time, with 34.5 million total viewers. 1.3 billion overall impressions. 10,000 press articles. Over $50MM in earned PR value, and hundreds of millions more in validated lead revenue for IBM. In the end, 70% of Americans were aware that a super-computing system that understands natural language had defeated the best human champions on the game show JEOPARDY!—a Grand Challenge that fired imaginations worldwide.
The project began by creating WATSON’s visual identity, and led to documentary films, social media, digital and print advertising, PR, JEOPARDY! TV spots, demand generation and events. IBM WATSON garnered Gold and Silver Cannes Lions, two OneShow Pencils, a Gold Clio, a Gold London International Advertising Awards for Integrated Campaign, and the ECHO Governor's Award. The Webby Awards named WATSON "Person of the Year."
For many, the Motel is a mythical place. Rarely a destination itself, but hopefully a vivid way-point on a great adventure. Over the past year I photographed with a film crew for Discovery Channel as they profile motel owners and their makeovers in towns around the Northeast. Some properties trade in nostalgia, while others lean to hipster ideals and relaxing pour-over vibes. All of them rekindled my need for travel, especially in these times. (Scroll down for the Gallery.)
Honeywell is one of the largest industrial conglomerates in the world, innovating everything from PPE to quantum computing. They’re also a company that hasn’t had a global brand campaign in over 30 years.
Recently Honeywell reorganized their entire global footprint, proclaiming they’re no longer “the thermostat” company, but an innovating tech leader that literally changes the way the world works.
The Future Is What We Make It reintroduces Honeywell to the board room through the work of real employees on a mission for all.
Note to your FA: Build a Better Portfolio.
Build America Mutual—BAM—insures money-raising municipal bonds against default; money that helps build schools, bridges and roads across America.
With a deep bench of credit analysts, a nationwide footprint and an enviable record of holding the line against bond defaults, BAM makes certain that the investments its clients make remain safe, while providing long term guaranteed returns.
This awareness campaign celebrates the spirit of forward progress and BAM’s mission for growth.
The winning pitch for Aetna’s B2B business. The national dialog around health care, and the ongoing changes to the insurance landscape, is an opportunity for a more human brand, one that can lead people towards wellness by making a complex system simpler, easier to understand, and in the end, healthier for everyone to use. “The New Healthy,” is a promise to move Aetna’s entire ecosystem of care from cost to quality, from complexity to simplicity, and from uncertainty to knowing.
A lifestyle brand built for the Adirondacks.
White Rainbow Farm is nestled in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains between Lake Placid and Plattsburg, NY. Originally a regenerative yoga farm oriented around holistic living and a deeper connection to the land and the soul, its owners have an entrepreneurial spirit, and White Rainbow is evolving into hospitality, recreation and lifestyle brands while expanding its mission to enlighten and entertain. Together with FØRM NYC, we developed identity systems and a vision for their various properties, apparel and product.
OneShow Silver and Bronze Pencil winner for Dynamic Data Visualization and Music; Clio Awards Silver and Bronze winner for Corporate Identity and Special Events
Accenture Strategy helps solve business problems for their customers by working at the intersection of business and technology. Portraying that intersection dramatically called for a disruptive format for B2B communications—a multi-sensory symphonic event.
Symphonologie is a first-ever live orchestral experience built using AI that identifies sentiment from the top stories in business and technology and converts it to music. The debut performance by a 52-piece orchestra and live data was held before 1000 international business leaders at the Louvre Museum, Paris.
See the performance at symphonolgie.com
A majority of millennials believe they won’t need a bank in three years. That’s just one stat in a series of town hall-type talks done for Cognizant banking and financial services. Company president Prasad Chintamaneni held forth on several disruptive trends for the category, published across Cognizant’s social channels. For business cable TV, we created a more B2C-flavored series that questions BFS practices, and invites leaders to think of disruptions as opportunities.
Thomas Witherspoon’s not-for-profit Ears to Our World (ETOW) organization delivers self-powered world band receivers to schools and communities in developing regions, for education, disaster relief, and lately, to help communities with visually impaired children. These hand-cranked radios let children and families in areas without much infrastructure hear educational programming, news, and health information along with music and the arts. I traveled with Thomas to Belize City to document the deployment of a few dozen such radios to children participating in a summer camp held each year by the Belize Council for the Visually Impaired (BCVI) in coordination with the Belize Ministry of Education.
Photographs by David Korchin.
“Re-introduce a century-old healthcare company in the midst of a pandemic,” is a pretty cool brief.
EHE Health has been in the preventive care business from the beginning, now leveraging data analytics and app-based diagnostics to keep employees healthier, and bottom-lines solid.
With a saturation media launch heavy in DOOH and subway takeovers in New York and Washington D.C., the reinvention called for a new visual mark. We chose to evolve an instantly recognizable and resonant shape to telegraph the company’s value proposition.
The mark retains the symbolic essence of health and care, and brings to it the contemporary meaning of collaboration, innovation and partnership—a layered approach that underscores the power of the EHE Health brand.
Guys just trying to keep things neat. A campaign proposal for Philips—a body of experts, a league of hirsute gentlemen, keepers of the flame, the teachers of others. It’s not an exclusive club (the only requirement is hair) but the sense of style imbued by these men, their deep knowledge and proven record of accomplishment, is what draws others to their camp. These are Men for other Men.
The Groomsmen are go-to style mavens consulted through apps and social networks. Smart phone cameras let you pick the right face or body style for you, and share your vision with others. No look is off limits.
Sure it looks pretty but what does it mean? Leading IBM data experts break it down for us in online units that underscore the importance data and advanced analytics has on business, governments and society. Incredible visualizations using publicly available data sets from digital artist Gwen van Hee.
If you like it, share it. We encouraged over three million people to prescribe Vaseline’s new Clinical Therapy moisturizer online to their friends and family. Part travelogue, part documentary, the experience used video and photography to illustrate firsthand how a product can spread from one woman in a small Alaska town, to across the nation.
The 10-year-old boy in me loves a good walkie-talkie. So a couple of years ago I studied hard and passed the federal exam to get a license to play with bigger radios. As I began attending swap meets, field days and club meetings in my area, I got to know more than a few curious, colorful amateur radio operators, or "hams"—I call them Hamateurs.
The Hamateurs Project is about these hobbyists; the unheralded tinkerers and eccentrics, makers and researchers who continue to expand radio—this “ancient” technology—to new purpose, along with the equally primal need to simply talk to someone.
It’s the most-watched spectator sport held annually. And every year IBM, a long-time sponsor of the Grand Slam tournament, is there court-side, with radar guns and score tallies ready. It was time for something new.
We worked with IBM and the US Tennis Association to bring the data of the championship to viewers—every ace, double fault, break point, etc. in a dynamic, real-time interactive data visualization of key matches throughout the Open.
Health care is dead. Feel better? The US spends more on health care than any country in the world, yet we rank far lower terms of overall population health. The huge system that keeps us well is overly-complex, expensive and burdened by process and paperwork. Aetna is in a position to remedy all that—publicly vowing to change the health care system through innovation, collaboration and technology. So we launched a digital and print thought-leadership campaign that lays out the argument for change, addresses specifics, and spurs conversation.
A lot of companies use social media to let their employees collaborate, innovate and extend the enterprise. To build awareness of IBM Social Business offerings, we created a shareable series of "60-Second Socials"—short story-driven case studies that prove being an online enterprise is more than CEO-saving PR Tweets.
Everyone at some time is bound for a return home. What awaits there is unknowable; what might be glimpsed, ephemeral. But the future—ours, theirs, yours—is inevitable. And I promised myself I would not look away when it presented itself. So my homecoming, the last I would have with my mother, was spent at her bedside in a long goodbye that I hold on to the only way I know how.
Yay! You made the C-Suite. Now what? IBM’s Institute for Business Value commissions and publishes studies aimed at understanding the state-of-the-state for business leadership. The Essential CIO Study was the first of its kind, with more than 3000 respondents polled from diverse enterprises of every scale. So the CMO, CTO, CFO—anyone with a C in front—benefits from this Demand Gen program aimed at select IT professionals.
