As one of Ogilvy’s last campaigns for IBM, Not Our AI Reality pokes fun at the proliferation of AI discourse and its effects on business leaders.
Three 30-second spots portray a deluge of conversations and presentations — overlapping voices that espouse counterintuitive advice — seeding confusion and doubt among decision-makers about how to implement and maximize AI outputs and ROI.
IBM cites a meaningful gap between the high expectations and underwhelming results of AI, with research indicating that 52% of executives believe AI adoption doesn’t stem from a real business challenge and that only 30% of CEOs report a tangible impact of AI over the past year.
Not Our AI Reality takes aim at the fallacies, misdirection, exaggeration and information overload that have become
prevalent with AI, positioning the brand as a provider of clarity and solutions.
The campaign, which will
extend beyond CTV to out-of-home and social media, is the newest installment of IBM’s overarching Let’s Create Smarter
Business campaign, launched in September, which aims to demonstrate IBM’s advanced capabilities to integrate data and
apply AI efficiently to solve specific business problems, not simply pontificate on its conceptual use cases.
Let’s Create Smarter Business is an iteration of IBM’s Let Create, launched in 2022.
It’s “a fresh articulation of what IBM does best: understanding the real pressures business leaders face, and helping them turn complexity into clarity and technology into lasting impact,” said Liz Taylor, Ogilvy’s global chief creative officer, in a statement from September. “We’re speaking into the disillusionment that’s crept into the AI conversation, and making it clear that IBM sees exactly what’s going on — irony and all — and still knows how to build what matters.”
The new campaign’s premiere was timed for just after the 2026 Masters Tournament, with which IBM is celebrating 30 years of partnership. The brand has long treated its work for the Masters as a proof-of-concept for its technological capabilities, housing data infrastructure and maintaining a website and app for the tournament chock-full of AI features analysing real-time results.
For this year’s event, IBM hosted an inaugural Masters at Madison Square Park experiential activation in New York, serving as a viewing party for the four-day tournament and featuring an AI golf simulator.
After serving as IBM’s creative agency of record since 1994, Ogilvy opted not to participate in the tech brand’s RFP that kicked off in March. WPP Media had previously opted out of IBM’s media RFP in December; the media account was awarded to Omnicom in early April.
Source: Campaign US
