IBM is one of the world’s great companies. Its hundred-year history includes spearheading the mainframe computing revolution in the 1960s, building a machine that beat Kasparov at chess in the 1990s, and most recently Watson, the intelligent system that won Jeopardy!.

But its past was holding it back, both financially (70% of its revenue came from legacy products like mainframes) and perceptually (Business Decision Makers used words like “old”, “dated” and “boring” to describe IBM). That’s when my phone rang from the IBM’s worldwide media director, who was urgently looking to change perceptions as a leader and innovator in today’s IT. 73% of Millennials have risen into decision-making positions in their company and IBM projected they will represent most of its market opportunity by 2017, so our goal was to capture them using New York Media’s storytelling platforms.

The 2016 Met Gala’s theme was Manus x Machina—hand vs. machine. The red carpet would be full of celebrities modelling tech-themed designs, like Taylor Swift in Louis Vuitton and Beyoncé in Givenchy. But to capture the imagination of millennials, we wanted to create a dress where technology wasn’t just decoration, but integral to the creative process and the design itself. We partnered IBM with haute couture fashion brand Marchesa to create a dress that thinks and learns – a dress that can understand and incorporate trends, interact with other people, and respond to online feedback in real time by changing color.

We had a little more than five weeks, and to say the project was a dizzying maze of people and ideas would be an understatement. While the dress was being designed in a chic Chelsea studio, we were working behind the scenes to make sure that the dress would take center stage at ‘The East Coast Oscars’. My team looked at every little detail – from securing ten red carpet photographers to make sure we caught the dress from every possible angle, to working with the team at The Met to understand the type of lighting on the red carpet to make sure that the LED integrations shined brightly.

From start to finish, we documented the creation of the dress from research to red carpet. With custom photography, and interviews with the Marchesa team, IBM’s researchers, designers and technicians, we produced a long form article that made a cognitive computing story relevant to The Cut’s audience. We hit the publish button the second the doors to IBM’s limo swung open.

As the night progressed, we continued the conversation through social media, real-time photo updates, televised commercials and more, to ensure that the cognitive dress was the most prominent moment of the evening. Collectively, the endeavor gave the dress the platform it needed to surprise and delight the millennial audience. Once millennials were hooked, the article page saw consistently-high traffic for the next two weeks. The article was also filled with additional calls to action that drove the user journey to completion by providing information on relevant Watson and IBM technology.