Task
IBM Think brings together business leaders, technology decision-makers, innovators, developers, partners, and enterprise customers to explore the technologies shaping the future of business.
For IBM, the opportunity extended far beyond attracting attendees to the conference. The objective was to understand the audience at a deeper level—what they cared about, which technologies generated the strongest interest, what content resonated with them, and how those insights could be transformed into better conference experiences, stronger enterprise sales opportunities, and higher-performing marketing campaigns.
IBM used Turba Media as an AI-powered audience intelligence and marketing platform to bring these elements together.
Through deep audience analysis, Turba Media helped IBM identify the interests, behaviours, conversations, preferences, and emerging themes surrounding the IBM Think audience. Those insights were then transformed into actionable recommendations across conference content, enterprise lead generation, organic social media, paid advertising, creative production, and media buying.
The result was a highly integrated, audience-led marketing strategy.
Conference audience engagement reached 78%—the highest level recorded.
IBM's social media advertising campaigns generated an 11x ROAS, also representing its highest-performing social media campaign result.
Following the success of the initiative, IBM expanded its relationship with Turba Media, becoming a global partner and user of the platform for its own activities and client campaigns worldwide.
Challenge
A major global conference generates enormous amounts of audience information.
Attendees search for topics before the event. They engage with speakers and content online. They discuss technologies across social channels. They interact with sessions, products, demonstrations, advertisements, videos, and thought leadership.
The challenge is turning all of those signals into useful intelligence.
IBM wanted to move beyond traditional conference analytics and understand the people behind the numbers.
The key questions included:
- Who is attending IBM Think?
- What technologies, products, and business challenges are most important to them?
- What topics are generating the strongest engagement?
- Which content should IBM prioritise during the conference?
- Which attendees and audience segments represent potential enterprise sales opportunities?
- Which IBM products are most relevant to those audiences?
- How can those insights improve organic and paid social media performance?
Turba Media provided IBM with a central intelligence layer designed to answer those questions and convert the findings directly into marketing and commercial actions.
Approach
1. Deep Audience Intelligence
IBM used Turba Media to conduct an in-depth analysis of the IBM Think audience.
Rather than treating conference attendees as a single demographic group, Turba Media analysed the audience across multiple dimensions to identify distinct interests, behaviours, conversations, affinities, and areas of technology demand.
Turba Media's AI reporting consolidated these signals into actionable audience intelligence.
IBM could identify which subjects were attracting the greatest attention and understand the differences between individual audience segments.
Instead of asking:
"What content do we think the audience wants?"
IBM could begin with:
"What is the audience already telling us it wants?"
That distinction became fundamental to the IBM Think strategy.
2. Building Conference Content Around Audience Demand
Turba Media's audience intelligence was shared with the teams responsible for IBM Think programming and content.
The insights highlighted the topics, technologies, challenges, and areas of innovation generating the greatest audience interest.
IBM used this intelligence to help optimise:
- Conference themes
- Presentations
- Sessions and workshops
- Product demonstrations
- Thought-leadership content
- Social content
- Speaker messaging
- Supporting digital content
Content could therefore be aligned more closely with what the audience actually wanted to learn about.
Result: 78% Audience Engagement
The audience-led approach contributed to an engagement level of 78%—the highest recorded for the conference.
Rather than using audience intelligence only to promote IBM Think, IBM used it to improve the experience inside the event itself.
3. Turning Conference Intelligence Into Enterprise Sales Opportunities
The value of the audience intelligence did not end when the conference finished.
Turba Media's analysis was also provided to IBM's enterprise sales organisation.
The reports helped identify audience segments demonstrating strong interest in specific technologies, business solutions, and IBM products.
This created an important bridge between marketing intelligence and sales intelligence.
Instead of handing the sales organisation a generic database of conference attendees, IBM could provide greater context around audience interests and potential commercial intent.
Enterprise sales teams could use these insights to:
- Identify potential leads
- Prioritise audience segments
- Understand the interests of prospective customers
- Match audience needs with relevant IBM solutions
- Personalise sales conversations
- Determine which products to promote
- Develop more relevant follow-up communications
The conference audience therefore became more than an event database.
It became an actionable enterprise opportunity.
4. Audience Intelligence Powered IBM's Social Strategy
IBM also used Turba Media's AI reports to shape its social media strategy.
Audience intelligence identified the topics and conversations generating the strongest interest, allowing IBM's marketing teams to develop organic content around demonstrated audience demand.
Instead of creating content first and attempting to find an audience afterward, the process was reversed:
Audience → Intelligence → Content → Distribution → Optimisation
Organic social content was developed around the subjects the audience was already engaging with.
This helped create a more relevant content ecosystem before, during, and after IBM Think.
5. AI-Powered Advertising Production
Turba Media was also used to transform audience intelligence directly into advertising.
Using insights from its AI reports, IBM developed campaign concepts and creative designed around the interests of individual audience segments.
Turba Media supported the production of the complete advertising ecosystem, including:
- Static advertising creatives
- Video advertising concepts and assets
- Campaign messaging
- Primary text and introductions
- Headlines
- Descriptions
- Calls to action
- Audience-specific messaging
- Product-focused advertising
- Creative variations for testing
This connected audience discovery and creative production within the same marketing workflow.
The people creating the advertising were therefore working from the same intelligence being used to understand the audience.
6. From Audience Insight to Media Buying
Turba Media's audience analysis also informed the structure of IBM's paid social media campaigns.
Rather than separating audience research, creative development, messaging, and media buying into isolated activities, IBM could connect them.
The Turba Media workflow:
- Analyse the Audience
- Identify Interests & Intent
- Create Audience Segments
- Identify Relevant IBM Products
- Generate AI Marketing Recommendations
- Develop Organic Content
- Generate Static & Video Advertising
- Create Headlines, Intros & Descriptions
- Build Paid Social Campaigns
- Launch, Measure & Optimise
This created a closed-loop marketing process in which audience intelligence influenced almost every major campaign decision.
Results
The IBM Think initiative demonstrated the commercial potential of combining audience intelligence, generative AI, creative production, sales enablement, and media buying.
78% Audience Engagement
IBM Think achieved an audience engagement level of 78%, representing its highest recorded engagement result.
Audience intelligence helped IBM better align conference content with the topics and technologies attendees demonstrated the greatest interest in.
11x ROAS
IBM's social media campaigns generated an 11x Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)—the highest ROAS achieved across its social media campaigns.
Audience intelligence influenced not only who IBM targeted, but also what IBM communicated, which products it promoted, and how advertising creative was developed.
Enterprise Lead Generation
Audience analysis was transformed into actionable information for IBM's enterprise sales organisation.
The intelligence helped sales teams identify potential leads and understand which IBM products and solutions were most relevant to specific audience groups.
One Audience Intelligence Ecosystem
Conference strategy, organic social media, advertising creative, media buying, and enterprise sales were connected through a common source of audience intelligence.
Key Results at a Glance
- 78% — Audience engagement — highest recorded
- 11x ROAS — Highest social media campaign ROAS achieved
- Deep Audience Intelligence — Conference attendees analysed by interests, behaviours and engagement
- Enterprise Lead Generation — Audience intelligence provided to sales teams
- Product Intelligence — High-interest IBM products identified by audience segment
- AI Content Strategy — Organic content informed by audience interests
- AI Creative Production — Static, video and advertising copy developed from audience intelligence
- Integrated Media Buying — Audience intelligence informed targeting, creative and campaign strategy
- Global Partnership — IBM expanded its relationship with Turba Media worldwide
From Successful Campaign to Global Partnership
The IBM Think project demonstrated that Turba Media could deliver value beyond an individual advertising campaign.
Audience intelligence became useful across:
Events → Marketing → Content → Advertising → Media Buying → Sales
The success of the initiative led IBM to expand its relationship with Turba Media.
IBM became a global Turba Media partner, using the platform both internally and in support of client campaigns around the world.
This represented a significant evolution of the relationship—from using Turba Media for a campaign to incorporating the platform into a broader global marketing ecosystem.
The Bigger Impact
The IBM Think case study illustrates a fundamental shift in modern marketing.
Traditionally, organisations analyse an audience primarily to determine who should see an advertisement.
Turba Media expands the role of audience intelligence.
The same intelligence can influence:
what an organisation talks about, what content it produces, which products it promotes, how its sales teams prioritise opportunities, what advertising it creates, and how media budgets are deployed.
For IBM, audience intelligence became more than a targeting tool.
It became a decision-making layer connecting the conference experience, marketing, creative production, media buying, and enterprise sales.
Turba Media
Understand your audience. Create what matters to them. Turn intelligence into growth.