Situation:

73% of IBM’s revenue came from ‘old’ IT products like tabulating machines, typewriters hard drives. So with these revenues declining faster than the new revenues growing, IBM had reported 14 consecutive quarters of revenue decline. The only way to slow this decline was to replace lost revenue.

Even though IBM had made inroads in the ‘new’ IT space like, ‘cloud’, 'AI' and ‘data’’- being a late entrant in the market, IBM had to differentiate it’s capabilities to stand out and succeed in an over-crowded IT market to become a 'preferred IT Partner of choice'.

Brief:

Establish IBM as a ‘preferred’ partner of choice, for IT Buyers to solve their real business problems with AI.

Marketing Objective:

Awareness creation: Dominate conversations around AI positioning IBM’s offering as a technology for everyone across industries. Increase Awareness and Consideration scores from 40 points to 70 points (as per IBM's Brand Health Monitor).

20 Hashtags from 29 regions (of the Vogue winners) and over 5 Mil images were sourced and fed into IBM's AI tool, to understand India’s regional trends and designs. This helped analyse and identify dominant trends, color, image similarities related to the hashtags. Access to this tool was given to Gaurav Gupta to use as inspiration to design a saree gown.

IBM IoT was used to integrate lights in the saree created which lit up in different colors based on the personality of the winner being awarded. Each time a winner arrived on stage, the saree flowed in the colors of the winners most dominant personality.

Result- A never-seen-before-sari-gown hybrid replete with LED lights worn by the event’s MC and Emmy Award-winning actress Archie Panjabi.

Placement & Scale:

25th August- 25th October

YT

FB

Instagram

Twitter

LinkedIn

Sites like ET, CNN, Hindu, Mint, YourStory and Business Standard

ET and Vogue