Turba Media partners with IBM to revolutionize media buying strategies
Turba Media, a data-powered digital technology agency, specializes in connecting brands and events with audiences by unlocking ‘community capital’. With a diverse clientele including streaming platforms, major brands, e-commerce platforms, conferences, record labels and international festivals, Turba Media delivers high-impact audience insights to leading brands and institutions.
Facing growing pressure to provide deeper, more instantaneous analytics, Turba Media aimed to incorporate generative AI (gen AI) into their analytics infrastructure. The challenge lay in the increasing volume and complexity of data from GDPR-compliant proprietary APIs integrated with major social media platforms and blog networks, which posed a significant scalability challenge. Clients demanded precision tools to uncover emerging trends and sentiment shifts that could shape campaigns, necessitating a solution that could rapidly synthesize large data sets, generate context-rich narratives and deliver custom insights at scale.
Turba Media embarked on a transformative journey with IBM to overcome their scalability challenges in providing deeper, more instantaneous analytics. The agency aimed to incorporate gen AI into their analytics infrastructure to rapidly analyze audience behaviour and segments, generate insights and deliver advanced reports based on custom metrics. They chose IBM® watsonx.ai®, an enterprise-grade AI studio, because of its ability to bring together traditional machine learning (ML) and gen AI capabilities, with high-quality data across the AI lifecycle. Turba Media leveraged the pro-code and low-code tools of watsonx.ai and accessed best-in-class IBM and third-party models, APIs and SDKs to innovate and create customized AI-powered solutions. The collaboration between Turba Media and IBM was marked by seamless integration of IBM's open, trusted and hybrid AI infrastructure. Turba Media's AI researchers utilized watsonx.ai to explore and experiment with foundation models, build prompts for various use cases and tune models with labeled data. This partnership enabled Turba Media to unlock the power of gen AI, transforming complex behavioral data into actionable insights and delivering unparalleled audience intelligence. The implementation process involved granting administrator access to an AI researcher, who could then automatically install all IBM watsonx® platform services and set up a starter watsonx project. This setup allowed the AI researcher to begin working immediately, fostering a collaborative environment for developing and deploying AI applications. Through this strategic partnership, Turba Media successfully addressed their scalability challenges and enhanced their ability to provide precision tools for uncovering emerging trends and sentiment shifts that could shape campaigns.
Turba Media has significantly transformed their operational capabilities and client services through their partnership with IBM. By implementing watsonx.ai for AI builders, Turba Media has accelerated the speed at which insights are generated and acted upon, enabling more agile and responsive marketing decisions. The real-time sentiment analysis and trend forecasting integrated into all live campaigns have led to demonstrable improvements in ad targeting accuracy, return on investment (ROI) and content relevance. Turba Media's user-friendly dashboards now offer non-technical users direct access to powerful insights, removing the need for intermediary data analysts and boosting transparency.
The collaboration between Turba Media and IBM has not only enhanced Turba Media's analytical capabilities but also democratized data access. Marketers, strategists and event producers can now query real-time campaign and cultural data using natural language, significantly improving results compared to traditional media buying methods. This transformation has been showcased at prestigious industry events, including Asia Tech 2024, IBM Think® Singapore and Gartner Digital Gold Coast. At these events, Turba Media demonstrated their ability to aggregate and analyze live data directly from attendees in real time, offering unparalleled audience intelligence.
Turba Media's founders, Matt Bonner and Effi Shwintarsky, have publicly emphasized the familial nature of their ongoing collaboration with IBM, underscoring mutual trust and a shared vision for the future of AI-powered media strategy. As a result, Turba Media has become a frontline collaborator and innovator in the IBM ecosystem, presenting at multiple industry events and leveraging gen AI to mine cutting-edge community and cultural insights.
The impact of this partnership is evident in Turba Media's success with clients such as Subsonic Festival. By leveraging the watsonx.ai tools, Turba Media was able to inform media buying and ad placement strategies, resulting in standout campaign metrics. The metrics include <4.62% click-through rate (CTR) and a 5.56+ return on ad spend (ROAS). These results underscore the power of integrating advanced AI with culturally intelligent marketing.
“Audience intelligence by Turba Media is both innovative and disruptive. Leveraging gen AI, they help organizations uncover rich behavioral insights and monetize audience patterns that were previously invisible, transforming data into tangible business outcomes,” says Loke Peng Yuen, Global Business Development and Sales Leader at IBM.
Turba Media (link resides outside of ibm.com) is a data-powered digital technology agency based in Australia and they provide enhanced analytical capabilities through their proprietary media insight platform. The company specializes in leveraging advanced gen AI-powered analytics to uncover nuanced audience motivations, thematic trends and predictive signals. Turba Media’s offerings include business intelligence, data management, data science consulting, data visualization, behavioral segmentation, ad campaign management and personalized content creation. Their services cater to a diverse clientele across media, gaming and publishing, and their approach combines community-driven insights and advanced analytics to deliver smarter media buying strategies, messaging and content frameworks.
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Examples presented as illustrative only. Actual results will vary based on client configurations and conditions and, therefore, generally expected results cannot be provided.