Collaboration made with social – new IBM TV campaign – #MadewithIBM

I can finally announce the “secret project” I have been involved with over the past couple of months.

This week during the Masters Golf in the US, IBM (my employer) is launching a new TV campaign called “Made with IBM”.

You can read more about the campaign in an article from the New York Times.

“To introduce a new campaign, “Made with IBM,” the company dispatched three filmmakers to 17 countries to document its technology in action. About half of the spots, which are 30 or 60 seconds long, feature businesses, public agencies and other IBM customers.”

My contribution can be seen below, and I even get a name-check.

I love the ending and my daughter Madeleine wants to know what happened to the big chair at the end.

Some may have noticed I was hinting about my involvement with the campaign on twitter over the last few weeks – while in Austin at SXSW when I recorded 2 hours of video interviews, then a couple of weeks ago when I was recording the voiceover that appears on the video in London.

Here early in Austin at a super-secret location filming a super-secret piece #sxsw #sxswIBM http://t.co/83EYnLsYwA

— Andrew Grill (@AndrewGrill) March 9, 2014

Laying down tracks – never a dull day @IBMInteractive #ibmix http://t.co/O5SMFYPaGo

— Andrew Grill (@AndrewGrill) March 28, 2014

With all that content, who knows where I might turn up next ;-).

Having only just celebrated my first 6 months with IBM this week, I was very humbled that they asked me to take part in this new and very public TV campaign.

The strap line for my vignette is “Collaboration made with social. Made with IBM”.

The campaign highlights other IBMers, Customers and IBM technologies in the multiple TV spots and is the next phase of @SmarterPlanet campaign that IBM has been running for some years now.

More videos can be seen on the dedicated site ibm.com/madewithibm and also on the IBM YouTube channel.

IBM’s CMO Jon Iwata also has a great blog post about the reasoning behind the campaign, as well as a making-of video – embedded below.

Apparently I was one of just 20 IBMers who appear in the spots – must be my Aussie accent they liked.

The NYT article also talks about the process that Ogilvy and IBM used to shoot and edit the ads.

Jeremy Kuhn, a global group account director at Ogilvy, said that the campaign about IBM technology relied, appropriately enough, on IBM technology, namely Aspera, software for large file transfers that allowed hours of video to be transferred quickly.

“Traditionally when the footage is shot, you wait for the team to come back to load it all in to begin editing, but we had something like 13 different shoots between the three main crews and if we waited until everyone got back to New York, we never would have made the Masters in time,” Mr. Kuhn said. “We were reliant on Aspera, an IBM technology, to do that, so this very production was kind of a case study.”