Chevy’s new ad campaign uses IBM’s Watson to induce self-reflection

Use Watson’s personality insights and sentiment analysis to get free gas.

Megan Geuss

• Positivity score calculated on just my Twitter account.

• Positivity score after adding Facebook posts. How sad.

• The personality assessment didn't change much though.

On Tuesday night, Chevrolet rolled out a new ad campaign called “Fueling Possibilities” that uses IBM’s AI software Watson to give people positivity tests. The ad campaign’s “positivity pump” looks at your Twitter and Facebook accounts in order to assess how upbeat your posts are.

Chevrolet’s parent company, GM, said that it would be bringing traveling positivity pumps to gas stations around the world for the remainder of the year. Customers will be able to input their social media account names and get free gas based on their positivity score (more positivity gets you more free gas).

The positivity pump has already stopped in Buenos Aires, Cape Town, and New Orleans, and Chevy has released an ad using footage from all three locations.

Even if the positivity pump never comes to A Gas Station Near You, Chevy and IBM partnered to create the “Chevrolet Global Positivity System.” Users can access the system through a website and input their social media aliases to see their positivity score, which is based on a scale of 0 to 200. The score is calculated by IBM’s Watson platform, which analyzes social media posts and identifies positive keywords. Watson then employs IBM’s Personality Insights API “to glean personality characteristics and users’ ‘top traits’ based on the content they posted and shared,” as a post from Chevy Chief Marketing Officer Tim Mahoney notes.

The platform also runs the AlchemyLanguage API to conduct sentiment analysis, which returns “a social personality profile based on the text Watson has indexed. [AlchemyLanguage] is also responsible for showing users their most positive and least positive posts.”

When I linked just my Twitter account, I got a 97 out of 200. Chevy’s website says I’m “on the road to positivity.” Hrm. Still less than the average, which is apparently 121. Who are these 121 people? What ray of sunshine were they born under? When I linked my Twitter as well as my Facebook account, I got a 92 out of 100. Sorry, Mom—Facebook is dragging me down.

But when you take a look at the tweets and Facebook posts that are singled out as “most positive” and “least positive,” some light-hearted sarcasm seems to have gone undetected by Watson, while negative but tongue-in-cheek posts are rated as very happy. (Here's an example of the negative and positive tweets it picked for me. Warning: I tweeted a curse word to Ars’ tech editor Lee Hutchinson in a joke tweet about Breaking Bad and Watson thought that was very negative.)

The Global Positivity System also creates a personality assessment based on your social media posts. Watson called me “skeptical, inner-directed, and unconventional.” Sorry Watson, I’m already married.

For all the cognitive software’s flattery, however, Watson is still just software reading complex human language. Chevy and IBM’s Personality Insights Engine also said that I am solemn. “You are generally serious and do not joke much,” it asserted, which is funny, because I think all of my tweets are hysterical. Maybe I ought to toss in a gratuitous “LOL” here and there. HAHA. (That one is preventative in case of a dark future in which Condé Nast hires IBM to assess my Ars Technica articles for positivity.)

GM spokesperson Craig Daitch said the company is not keeping any personal information, and you won’t see a bunch of Chevy ads on Twitter and Facebook after you use the Global Positivity System. GM will mostly be collecting things that other websites routinely collect—unique visitors, how much time they spent on the site, and so forth. “The objective of the Fueling Possibilities campaign is to create awareness in global markets for our brand and what we stand for,” Daitch wrote to Ars in an e-mail. “Chevrolet is at different stages of brand awareness around the globe and a global campaign such as Fueling Possibilities helps us create consistency as to who we are as Chevrolet.”

All in all, the Fueling Possibilities campaign places very little emphasis on the merits of Chevy's cars. It’s a play for brand recognition, capturing users’ eyeballs by coaxing them into taking a souped-up version of those personality tests we used to take in pre-teen magazines when we were bored 10-year-olds on summer vacation.

For IBM, this ad campaign is just another way to show off Watson, which the company has used to power a robot concierge, play Jeopardy, and estimate water use efficiency.

According to a statement from Stephen Gold, the vice president of IBM’s Watson division:

One of the key pillars of cognitive computing is the ability to surface valuable insights... What Chevy is doing with Watson enhances not just personal engagement, but also helps show customers the value they are delivering to others through positivity. It’s a creative way of using technology to amplify a uniquely human attribute.