Reported execution: the fish escaped the deck
WPP describes Fishy.AI as an Adobe Summit activation for IBM and Adobe. Adobe Firefly generated surreal fish for a Sphere takeover, IBM’s booth, out-of-home placements, keynote material and a mobile-led experience. Attendees could ‘catch’ fish and receive an education point about unreliable or poorly governed AI output.
The case says the 90-second Sphere activation appeared every 30 minutes across the four-day summit. Its message, ‘Trust What You Create,’ linked the comic images to IBM watsonx and Adobe cloud tools. This was not a demonstration that an image model has solved governance; it was a campaign that made the governance problem into a public visual event.
Our reading: an abstraction needs a memorable consequence
Hallucination, bias and auditability are usually described in language that does not travel far beyond a conference session. The fishbowl gives each concern a shape without pretending the image itself is evidence. A strange fish is a useful warning sign because it is instantly legible as something that does not belong.
The metaphor also benefits from being deliberately silly. A solemn visual treatment could have repeated the technical tone the work was trying to interrupt. Humour gets attention; the surrounding game and education points give that attention somewhere to go.
Production lesson: keep the metaphor tied to a next action
For an experiential brief, decide which claim the image is allowed to make and which has to be explained elsewhere. A visually broken output can introduce a conversation about trust, but cannot demonstrate model controls on its own. Make the next interaction specific: a short lesson, a product explanation or an invitation to inspect a workflow.
The asset system should also hold together across a building-sized screen, a phone and tabletop material. Version prompts and final selections, and test whether the joke remains readable at each distance. Consistency is not only a brand requirement here; it keeps the governance message from dissolving into spectacle.
Evidence boundary: event metrics are not a governance audit
WPP reports funnel, understanding, trust, earned-impression and social-engagement figures. They are useful as agency-reported campaign outcomes, not as proof that attendees adopted safer AI practices or that any platform is inherently trustworthy.
A stronger follow-up would measure whether people could identify a concrete control after interacting with the activation, and whether that knowledge changed a later decision. The durable archive lesson is modest: generative imagery can dramatize a risk when the campaign is candid about the difference between awareness and assurance.
Sources & limits
WPP agency case study; event mechanism is documented by the maker, while reported outcomes are campaign claims.
- WPP — Ogilvy: IBM and Adobe’s Fishy.AI — source publication date not stated.
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