Brief:

• Campbell’s teamed with Watson Advertising, which was previously the ad sales business of the Weather Channel, to help consumers create new dinner recipes, per a statement made available to Mobile Marketer. The ad combines the artificial intelligence (AI) of IBM’s “Chef Watson” and natural language processing APIs with Campbell’s recipe library to generate recipes.

• Consumers can either talk to the ad by pressing an on-screen “mic” button or type in the ingredients they have on hand to start creating recipes. The ad also has buttons labeled with suggested dishes, such as “chicken & broccoli,” “steak & rice,” or “bacon & asparagus.”

• The ad responds to consumer preferences with a message that says “Look what we cooked up,” followed by recipe cards that list ingredients and instructions on how to prepare the dish with a Campbell’s product, such as its line of soups or Pepperidge Farm baked goods. The Campbell’s Watson Ad is available on food and recipe sites, The Weather Channel app and weather.com.

Insight:

Campbell is returning for a second round with Watson Ads, suggesting the AI-powered ads remain an area of interest for marketers.

AI is expected to help brands produce customized creative, as in the case of the Campbell’s ad, and give greater insights into consumer preferences, eMarketer said last week in an interview with Chris Victory, vice president of partnerships at MediaMath, a demand-side ad platform that partnered with IBM’s Watson.

Watson Advertising said its ads are the first AI-powered advertising creative that can make sense of unstructured data, such as consumer food preferences in the case of Campbell’s. The AI-powered ad unit lets consumers connect with brands, while giving marketers a chance to have personalized conversations with their audiences. Brands can use the insights gleaned from the engagements with consumers to help with marketing plans and strategies, from product to supply chain management to marketing.

For years, cooking websites have offered suggested recipes based on a consumer’s food preferences or ingredients they have on hand, but Watson Ads incorporate those interactive features with speech recognition and machine learning to enhance customization for consumers. However, the ad shows a disclaimer saying “Watson inventions are not kitchen tested” that some consumers may find disconcerting. Kitchen testing is a time-honored practice of recipe resources because it provides interest consumers with some confidence that the recipes actually work.  

AI technology is expected to play a bigger role in programmatic advertising, which uses computer algorithms to automatically insert ads into apps and websites, per the eMarketer interview. Victory said that AI technology will help brands to make better decisions about how to spend their money, with better insights on the mood of the user and better contextual analysis of a web page that shows the ad, Victory said.