IBM, Weather Co. bring Watson AI to ads

IBM Watson has talked tennis with Serena Williamsand music with Bob Dylan. Now it wants to talk to you.

The Weather Company, acquired by IBM in January, will begin bringing Watson-enhanced interactive advertisements to The Weather Channel and Weather Underground apps on Android and iOS and to weather.com andwunderground.com this summer.

The ads, powered by Watson's artificial intelligence, will let consumers ask questions such as "What would be good to cook for dinner?" or "Is this medicine safe for my child?" The first companies with Watson-enabled ads will be Campbell Soup, GSK Consumer Healthcare and Unilever.

Consumers will be able to engage with Watson Ads from those companies online using voice or text questions. Ads that The Weather Company and IBM Watson teams have tested for Campbell Soups and Hellmann's mayonnaise, a Unilever brand, allow consumers to ask Watson questions such as "'What do you have in your pantry?' or 'What are three ingredients you have on hand?' and Watson goes and creates a recipe based on the product and what is on hand," said Domenic Venuto, The Weather Co.'s general manager for consumer products. "We know a lot of families start to think about that night’s meal about 4 in afternoon."

If the consumer doesn't like the resulting recipe, they can modify the request, perhaps suggesting a flavor profile, he says. And, when relevant, Watson can access weather data for seasonal foods and health care recommendations.

Watson is IBM's platform for artificial intelligence, which it calls cognitive technology. Watson can process large amounts of data such as countless recipes and food combinations -- or when it comes to health care, medical databases, for instance -- assessing, learning and responding in natural language.

The goal is to make interactive ads that consumers willingly interact with, Venuto says. "We have can bring cognitive intelligence or cognitive capabilities and put them into our advertising and make them much more interesting, engaging and useful and bring utility and value to our consumer base," he said.

Advertisers such as GSK Consumer Healthcare hope to better serve customers and learn from what Watson learns from them, says the company's Chief Marketing Officer Theresa Agnew. Should a parent have a question about its Flonase nasal spray, for instance, "rather than them having to use a particular keyword and insert it, they can ask the question the way they are comfortable asking it ... in their own words," she said. "Then through cognitive advertising, the artificial intelligence behind this, we are able to respond and give them the information they are looking for."

Watson "humanizes the whole experience of interacting with a brand," Agnew said. "It’s a really unique new technology that we wanted to be the first movers in."

And what Watson learns could inform the advertiser, too. "There could be some gems of information we get from our consumers in how they are asking questions around new products we might come up with," Agnew said.

As part of the deal announced in October 2015, IBM acquired The Weather Co. brand, its data and digital properties including weather.com, forecasting operation Weather Underground, and Weather Services International, a division that sells software to business customers. The Weather Channel -- owned by the Weather Co.'s original owners, a consortium comprising the private equity firms TheBlackstone Group and Bain Capital, and NBCUniversal -- licenses its forecast data and analytics and its brand from IBM under a long-term contract.

Even before that deal, the companies had worked together with the Weather Co.'s data moving onto IBM's cloud platform. Former Weather Co. CEO David Kenny became head of IBM's Watson platform in January, when the acquisition became final.

Venuto expects Watson Ads to expand soon with additional advertisers in retail, automotive and other food sectors. And, eventually, the ads will be available beyond IBM-owned properties, be shareable on social media and delivered to TV and in connected cars.

The Watson Ads project "really brings the promise of the two companies together in a very tangible way, and relatively quickly," Venuto said. "We’ve only been part of IBM for 120 days."