Dive Brief:

• IBM's latest campaign, "Trust What You Create," demonstrates some of the many ways that generative artificial intelligence (AI) can go wrong, per details shared with Marketing Dive.
• The campaign, in support of IBM's Watsonx AI platform and Adobe's cloud offerings, included several activations during last week's Adobe Summit, including a 90-second takeover of the Las Vegas Sphere that appeared every 30 minutes over the four-day event.
• "Trust What You Create," a collaboration with Ogilvy that used Adobe Firefly to create campaign visuals, comes as marketers begin to experiment more broadly with generative AI, a tool that has taken the tech and advertising worlds by storm.

Dive Insight:

IBM's "Trust What You Create" aims to provide brand managers and CMOs with an educational message about the negative effects of unmanaged generative AI as the technology begins to see wider adoption across the advertising landscape. The campaign is an extension of a previous IBM and Adobe Firefly collaboration that created social media ads that beat IBM’s internal benchmarks by 26-times, Jonathan Adashek, IBM's senior vice president, marketing and communication and chief communications officer, explained in a statement.

“The ‘Trust what you create’ campaign takes this concept one step further, by illustrating what can happen when AI goes wrong. With tools like IBM watsonx and Adobe Firefly, our clients can tap into the transformative power of AI that is equally trustworthy and reliable. Because — as the ad shows — when you are reproducing assets, whether one or thousands, ‘close enough’ doesn’t cut it,” the exec said.

Campaign visuals, created with Adobe Firefly, imagine AI errors around bias, noncompliance, siloed and unmanaged data, hallucinations and more as a wide-range of surreal goldfish with weird shapes and digital errors, like a "drift fish" that is actually a hamster with fish fins. The creative was born of Ogilvy staff’s experience as creators who are beginning to use — and find the pitfalls of — generative AI.

“We’ve all seen what can be made with AI, and there’s a lot of frenzy around needing to use it, but not much about how you need to be able to trust it. To bring that message to life, we wanted to make the overall campaign really playful and inviting, as well as educational. It’s AI gone wrong, sure, but that doesn’t mean it’s scary or off-putting. It's just wrong for your brand,” said Denise Zurilgen, a global executive creative director for IBM at the agency.

Along with a massive out-of-home activation at the Las Vegas Sphere — an increasingly popular marketing tactic — the campaign took over IBM's main event booth and included digital posters, tabletops and more that led to an interactive mobile experience at Adobe's digital summit.

With the rise of generative AI, marketing organizations face a number of challenges, including job uncertainty and the burden of learning new martech, but they are also bullish about the tech's ability to potential to boost the creator economy.