Friday, February 26, 2016

Reviewing IBM's "Coping with Humans" ad

IBM is debuting two new ads at the Oscars: "Coping with Humans: A Support Group for Bots" and "Ridley Scott + IBM Watson on Images"

I can't really fault IBM for featuring Ridley Scott and not a female director in the Images spot, because our friends over at the Academy didn't even nominate any women directors. :-/

So let's take a look at "Coping with Humans":

 

First off, kudos for using Carrie Fisher. Love her. Not to mention the idea of her being a therapist cracks me up, for obvious reasons.

Although these are robots, the speaking ones do have voices, so I did my usual male-to-female ratio analysis (which might be a bit flawed, I admit). 7 speaking male robots (including Watson), 2 speaking women robots. Plus Ms. Fisher. 30%. Slightly above average for advertising, but still not 50%.

However, extra point for having the robot that just wants to dust be a male robot. It would have been nice to see one of the world-dominating robots be a woman. Or if IBM had made Watson female to begin with. Although I guess you can't can't compete with Apple's Siri that way?

Grade: C+.

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