Pearl is the first AI jury. She will choose the winner of a special award in an experiment to celebrate MIXX’s 10th anniversary.
With Pearl, the organisers of the MIXX awards for the best online campaigns, want to open a debate about the future of award judging, particularly in light of recent criticism. Is it possible that AI could make judging fairer? Could it help make creativity measurable? And how might it complement human juries?
“What you call an award winning idea is binary matter to me,” Pearl noted in her video.
She was named after Radia Perlman, one of the prominent female internet pioneers and was fed with all international MIXX case studies from the last decade to prepare her. She was given 3 months to analyse the texts, videos, results and even music. She is without question the most experienced advertising jury on the planet.
Pearl uses state-of-the-art technology, for example: Microsoft gave early preview access to their Video Indexer service, which extracts insights from videos using Artificial Intelligence. She has taught herself to think like humans and has already reached an accuracy level of about 76%. In other words, if you feed her a new case, she is pretty good at being able to predict whether it will be a winner or not, and even what colour of award you might expect.
Pearl is already providing insights into what is important in an award winning idea. She has made links between narrative styles and awards, between choice of instruments and awards, and has understood that the number of impressions doesn’t mean that much, while number of shares is far more important.
She does, though, a bit to learn about recognising humour and a creative idea. But she can detect original combinations, which helps.
She is not yet perfect. “Sometimes she has the reasoning of a pregnant woman,” says Peter Ampe, ECD of DDB in Brussels. “She thinks tuna with whipped cream sounds like a great idea. But she’s still learning and her accuracy will continue to improve.”
So Pearl is not quite ready yet to replace human jurors, but she can already complement them. She doesn’t have the flaws human juries have. she is able to give every case the same level of attention, never grows tired, and perhaps most importantly doesn’t have friends to defend or a network or country to promote.
MIXX believes that AI will be able to help award shows in different ways in the future. For example, in larger award competitions, where much of the pre-judging is done in small groups, good campaigns are sometimes overlooked. With AI, it will be possible to judge which campaigns might be potential winners and then compare these with the shortlist the human jury has put together, so that human jury could perhaps revisit overlooked campaigns.
Learning about winning from Pearl
- Pearl is not impressed by the numbers of impressions you ran. She prefers qualitative metrics such as trending topic and earned media.
- If your campaign has had more than 100.000 shares, don’t hesitate to share it with the jury.
- Being mentioned by dedicated ad press is no guarantee to win. Being mentioned by BBC & CNN however, does give more credibility to your case.
- Upbeat feel good music is so much overused that it’s being perceived as cliché and generic.
- The use of a voice-over has a positive effect on the outcome.
- When it comes to new technologies, buzzwords have the most success in the year they were launched, and even more success in the year afterward.
- Case movies of winning campaigns contained 25% more suits than non-winning cases.
- Pearl can identify the originality of your campaign, but is still learning to recognise if an original idea is also meaningful.
The MIXX Award winners, including the winner that Pearl has judged, will be announced on October 19.
Entries close September 24. Enter here.
