Not every day is a good day in 2020, but today was.
We at Adweek learned this morning that our Super Bowl Bot, a bizarre ad-pitching AI dreamed up by me and my colleague, Patrick Kulp, had won the 2020 Shorty Award for best use of AI.
Candidly, my hopes hadn't been too high, given that our zero-budget oddity created by two people was up against several global brand projects, including last year's Cannes Lions Innovation Grand Prix winner.
While it's always exciting to see your work honored, I feel like there's a much bigger validation here:
Got a dumb idea that makes you and your coworkers/friends laugh? Build it.
I used to think that experimenting with emerging tech meant having to have a coding background—or finding someone who did and begging them to volunteer their services. But we're lucky enough to live in an era where, if you have a bit of patience and passion, you can build just about anything using resources that are already out there.
We built the Super Bowl Bot in about a day with no coding beyond a simple walkthrough we found online, and then it was just a matter of streamlining how it would work, how we'd expand its training (which would eventually include more than 4,500 Super Bowl ad descriptions) and how we'd push it out to social media.
After that, we just kept experimenting. Once we knew it could write an ad pitch, we asked it to write a song. Then a dialogue. And a poem. Heck, we even had it create a Bingo card for the Big Game itself.
As you might imagine, we learned a ton about AI along the way. What began as a silly idea in a Super Bowl planning meeting turned into an incredible playground for testing the edges of content-generating AI's capabilities.
And now it's won an award, beating out companies with massive budgets and huge agencies behind them. It's also attracted the interest of a few pretty massive companies on the cutting edge of AI.
So next time you have an idea for something that seems silly but also like a fun way to test a new aspect of technology, don't just laugh and move on.
Build it. See what happens.
Maybe it'll be dumb. But you can learn a lot from dumb. The thing they don't tell you in school is that you have to grind through a lot of being stupid to get smart.
Have you tackled a seemingly inane idea just to see where it went? Let me know at the email below, at @Griner on Twitter or over on Instagram at @DavidGriner.
David Griner
Creative and Innovation Editor, Adweek
David.Griner@Adweek.com
