Why
The Toyota Mirai is a ‘scientific’ car in the sense that it runs on hydrogen fuel cells, gets 312 miles on a full tank, and only emits water vapor. So, to target tech and science enthusiasts, the team decided to create thousands of ads with messaging crafted based on their interests.
How
After spending three months training the IBM’s supercomputer Watson to piece together coherent sentences and phrases, we helped create the campaign “Thousands of Ways to Say Yes” that pitches the Toyota Mirai through short video clips. To set up a structure for the campaign, 50 scripts were written based on location, behavioral insights, and occupation data that explained the car’s features. The scripts were then used to train Watson so it could whip up thousands of pieces of copy that sounded as if they were written by humans.
To give Watson guidelines yet allow it to have creative freedom to come up with some of the thoughts on its own, the AI scraped the internet, including sites like YouTube and Wikipedia, to create a neural network of words and phrases about what it means to be a scientist and put the thoughts together into sentences.
