The ROI Rules of AI: Marketing the Grammys With AI (Sponsored Content)

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It's the first Sunday in February and a Los Angeles arena is packed from music's biggest night, the Grammy Awards. Millions of fans worldwide are tuning in to see which of almost 900 artists will bring home the golden gramophones in close to 100 categories.

But as the show's producer, you've only had three months since the nominations were announced to promote the best of music this year across every genre and on every conceivable digital platform.

The National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences faces that challenge every year. Attention is in short supply, but we depend on that as an organization, not just for the awards, but ultimately for all the other activities that we're doing that are there to celebrate and advocate for creators. Capturing audiences is an important challenge that any organization has. That's Panos A. Panay, president of the Recording Academy.

To address that challenge, the Academy partnered with IBM to create an AI-powered content engine that could quickly create social content and insights about every Grammy nominee during the compressed awards season. From IBM and Bloomberg Media Studios, this is the ROI Rules of AI, and I'm your host, Edward Adams.

On this podcast, we're exploring how organizations of all sizes are using AI to remake their operations, increasing their return on investment, and that of their customers.

Pennay graduated from Boston's prestigious Berkeley College of Music with a degree in Music Business Management, and later served as the institution's Senior Vice President of Global Strategy and Innovation, overseeing its campuses in New York City, Valencia, Spain, and Abu Dhabi. He's also an amateur guitarist and trombonist.

The nonprofit recording academy is composed of 22,000 members, not just performers, but songwriters, arrangers, engineers, producers, and everyone else in the music creative community.

It advocates on public policy issues affecting music, undertakes educational activities, and supports musicians in need through its music cares philanthropy. But it's best known for celebrating excellence at the annual Grammy Awards. The Recording Academy has a five-person editorial team, but their need for content about Grammy nominees outstrips their ability to create it during the busy awards season.

Having worked with IBM on a variety of projects stretching back almost a decade, the Academy saw this as an opportunity to use IBM's What's the Next technology as a force multiplier.

I've always seen technology as a great amplifier of human creativity. So in collaborating with Watson X, we've been looking to amplify the capabilities of our own editorial team. From our standpoint, every nominee, every genre, irrespective of whether it's popular or not,

deserves its own moment in the sun, its own celebration. This is where our collaboration with Watson X can be extremely transformational in our ability to celebrate not only a handful, but every single one of our nominees.

IBM and the Recording Academy began the two-month project using large language models and then infused them with all the content and data the Academy had created over the years about nominees. That also changed the role of the Academy's editorial team from that of reporters and writers to becoming editors who checked every piece of content created for accuracy and the Grammy's brand voice.

Our people, they're absolutely hands-on. It's always great to have a human editor taking a look. Content range from artist insights to enhance the Grammy live stream viewing experience to social assets about various award categories and nominees. We generated over 4 million impressions across our social channels and over 1 million views on live.grammy.com during our live stream.

The project delivered the Recording Academy's most valuable commodity. The attention of music fans, says Penne. The single most important currency today is attention. And ultimately, all of us, whether you're a corporation that's selling a widget or whether you are an organization like the Recording Academy, the intelligent creation of content is a megaphone for your activities.

The Recording Academy had set itself up for success in two ways before ever undertaking the Content Engine Project. According to Brian Fallon, Vice President of Data, AI, and Automation for the U.S. National Market at IBM.

One, they were maniacally focused on the quality of their data, right? That's the basis of everything because what you're going to put into this is what you're going to get out at the end. And they already had done that in a meticulous fashion.

Two, they had set a policy for how they were going to use AI. I would encourage every company to do this. We've done it inside IBM. You got to understand what your guide rails are so that you know what you can solve with the technology versus what you're going to require humans to do. AI has the ability to unlock value from existing data that is in a variety of formats, balances.

The data challenges that the academy faced was not much different than other organizations. It's multi-modal in terms of not just binary data, it's videos. It's locked in PDFs, presentations. It's across many forms. How do you unlock that and unleash the power of that data to your internal constituents and your external clients? That's really what we were able to do with this project.

Writing content about Grammy nominees is one of those.

Those typically are the use cases where we want to start. And then we work backwards to utilize the data, both known and unknown, internal to the organization, and perhaps externally available to help go solve those challenges, leveraging the power of generative AI and automation.

For the Recording Academy, the return on investment in their AI-powered content engine ultimately wasn't just a means to create a lot of content, but a means to communicate with its audience on an emotional level, penises. It gave music fans a little taste of what he experiences every year behind the scenes at the awards ceremony.

In terms of being in the room during the Grammys, it's one of the most amazing experiences frankly you'll ever have. I've been in the music industry for 30 years. There's not been a Grammy night that I've attended that didn't blow me away. Even sometimes among the most celebrated stars,

getting a Grammy and what it means to them. It's really touching. On your obituary, if you want a Grammy, it will be likely either in the title or in the first line. So being in the room when somebody's life truly changes, that specialness doesn't go away.

Ultimately, music is an emotional thing. And for us, connecting with audiences around that is extremely important. The program with Watson X and the Recording Academy captures everything we want to be and the stories we want to develop as a means of creating that emotional engagement.

This has been the ROI Rules of AI, a podcast from IBM and Bloomberg Media Studios. If you like what you hear, subscribe and leave us a review. I'm Edward Adams. Thanks for listening.