Situation: The Mount Rushmore of big tech companies perched atop Silicon Valley are immortalized in the minds of consumers as innovators. Whether watching movies like The Social Network on tablets or reading about the epidemic of smartphone addiction on news apps, these technology innovators sit at the center people’s everyday lives.

What people don’t see – IBM at the center of the technologies people rely on throughout their everyday lives.

Brief: IBM – a B2B tech company -- was struggling to remain visible and relevant alongside major tech giants benefiting from their B2C footprint. Develop a campaign to highlight the importance of IBM technology in culture.

Objectives:

• Awareness: See IBM is putting smart to work behind the scenes of smart tech

• Relevancy: Feel IBM putting smart to work and actually making a difference in their daily lives and the broader world

To demonstrate how IBM is putting smart to work behind the scenes of people’s everyday tech lives, we designed to an interactive film to play on the tech people depend on most – their phones.

We tell a story that makes a point – smart technology is cool, but there is extraordinary IBM technology that is putting smart to work behind the scenes of people’s everyday and making the world better in truly interesting, innovative ways. IBM is taking the opportunity to help people see what technology can do when it is actually applied to help solve problems instead of being created to be “innovative.”

The experience holds true to the idea by not just talking about innovative technology – but actually using it in the execution.

Research: Social listening and ethnographic research indicated that the more frivolous “smart” becomes, the more it lowers perceptions of the tech industry at large.

Witness the Economist’s “A memo to big tech” which blames “smart” for perpetuating racism, election meddling, privacy breaches, autonomous driving fatalities, and the rise of teen depression and suicide.

Esquire recently bemoaned, "Silicon Valley's Tax-Avoiding, Job- Killing, Soul-Sucking Machine,”

concluding that, "we must bust up big tech."

Approach:

When the norm for “smart” becomes dumb, it can pose risks in the real world.

We want to show the world that “smart” technology isn’t actually “smart” unless it’s applied to solve real-world problems.

We saw an opportunity for IBM help reclaim the word “smart” by not just praising technology for having cool features, but showing the innovative outcomes that come from technology when its applied for a meaningful purposes -- putting smart to work.

Print, television, and out-of-home media accompanied by a unique URL, is used to help drive awareness and garner interest in visiting our Smart at Work interactive site.

Flexible-film, digital banners, programmatic, and social shows the difference between “smart” and “Smart at Work” to start to open people’s eyes to the unseen world of IBM all around them, encouraging them to click-through to our interactive site experience.

The site encourages users to view a purposefully-made film in landscape mode and rotate their phones to portrait mode when they see smart rays on the scene, indicating a point in time in which they can find out more about that topic.

The main experience will revolve around the film playing in full-width and full-height, taking up all of the browser with no user interface elements displayed on top. When the user taps on the screen, the video is paused and a timeline to control the video,

IBM’s logo and a menu icon appear. Closing the menu and unpausing the film by tapping it, will resume the viewing experience.

The site was initially concepted in February, filmed and designed in March, and tested and launched in April. The site is still awaiting test results.

Campaign in initial launch stage.