News Corp
Partnership
IBM is associated with some of the most iconic moments of the last 110 years.
60 years ago, IBM technology helped put the first man on the moon. 25 years ago Deep Blue beat grandmaster Garry Kasparov in a game of chess. 10 years ago, Watson beat the reigning champions on Jeopardy.
Unfortunately, this meant that people’s brand associations with IBM are built on stories of the past, not the future. We needed to stop talking about products, and start telling more stories of people to show our audience how IBM was empowering the next generation of change-makers.
In partnership with News Corp Australia, we embarked on a project to flip the narrative, co-creating stories on topics our audience were interested in across The Australian, News.com.au and Sky News, integrating IBM’s role in such projects natively and through contextual placements of traditional advertising with live TV broadcasts from our major customer events to The Australian’s first technology podcast ‘Forward Slash’ and the first feature-length TV documentary created in a partnership between Sky News and The Australian.
We engaged hugely influential local change-makers, from Woodside CEO, Peter Coleman, to Atlassian co-founder, Mike Cannon-Brookes, to Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, covering moments as significant as the Chinese hacking scandal to the hunt for a COVID-19 vaccine.
With direct editorial access to scientists, politicians and senior business and technology leaders, we were ready to share unique perspectives aligned to the topics of interest on a given day to demonstrate the role IBM plays in helping address some of the worlds hardest and most pressing challenges.
The Australian
With unprecedented collaboration between the commercial and editorial teams, we produced a series of 10 native articles that caught the news cycle, from cyber hackers to the development of new vaccines, hybrid work to the transformation of banking, AI to scientific breakthroughs, climate change, quantum computing, food fraud and the rise of corporate sustainability.
These topics were then amplified through other mediums in the partnership, from podcast episodes, to articles on news.com.au, deep dive interviews in The Deal or inclusion in the doccumentary.
201,192 page views delivered (101% of target)
2:02 min average dwell time (compared to publisher benchmark of 1:08min)
Forward Slash Podcast
2020 saw the world reshaped at an unprecedented pace. Trends that lasted weeks are lucky to survive an entire day. New vaccines. New ways to work. Energy, communication, education, healthcare.
With Technology enabling and accelerating many of these changes, our ambition was to demonstrate how it could also steer us towards a safer, fairer future. Hosted by David Swan and produced by Jackson Hewett, the fortnightly series was intended to extend across 10 episodes covering how society, business and technology are colliding and promoted in print, broadcast and online.
The interviews were so rich and engagement so successful that The Australian decided to release 8 bonus episodes diving into more detail with the IBM experts interviewed in each episode.
Episode 1 /vaccine
Episode 2 /work
Episode 3.1 /bonus cybersecurity
Episode 3 /hack
Episode 4.1 /bonus payments
Episode 4 /buy
Episode 5.1 /bonus AI for the eye
Episode 5 /ai
Episode 6.1 /bonus carbon data
Episode 6 /solar
Episode 7.1 /bonus manufacturing
Episode 7 /manufacturing
Episode 8.1 /bonus blockchain
Episode 8 /blockchain
Episode 8.1 /bonus cloud
Episode 9 /airbnb
Episode 10.1 /bonus quantum
Episode 10 /atlassian
Financial Press
With The Deal relaunched in 2020, IBM became one of their anchor partners, with 5 branded content articles included in print and online, reaping the benefits of a significant increase in subscriptions and digital and print readership to The Australian during the year.
Accompanied by contextually relevant print and digital placements, we paired interviews with IBM industry and technology experts and industry leaders from RMIT, Woodside, Westpac, Airbnb, Atlassian and the Australian Government among others, articles covers topics like:
news.com.au
In partnership with the commercial content team from news.com.au, we published 10x articles covering topics ranging from cybersecurity to supercomputing, skills, hybrid work, AI bias, domestic violence, environmental sustainability, weather forecasting, the economy and agriculture.
In addition to the editorial mentions, key articles also included explainer videos focusing on the technology that underpinned these solutions, maximising brand exposure while also driving high content engagement.
371,270 page views delivered (113% of target)
2:55 min average dwell time (compared 1:51 min in the previous year)
128,060 video views delivered (107% of target)
Sky News Integration
In 2020, Sky News and News Corp collaborated with IBM to deliver a bespoke campaign execution with integrated segments in First Edition aligning to the Forward Slash podcast and targeted interstitial placements in addition to the media-first documentary hosted by Ticky Fullerton.
13 integrated segments featuring 9 IBM executives delivered 243,900 cumulative broadcast reach in the core viewing hours of some of most critical business and government decision makers, working closely with IBM and The Australian to build upon key themes explored in written and podcast content.
Beyond COVID:
Emerging Stronger
In a new documentary – Beyond COVID: Emerging Smarter – Sky News Australia, in partnership with The Australian and IBM, explore the work going on behind the scenes in our health, social and economic response to the crisis, and how science and technology are enabling us to progress through the challenges posed by the global pandemic.
Sky News takes a look at the global industry collaboration through the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium, bringing together the most powerful computing resources in support of COVID-19 research. And in addition to the global efforts around finding a vaccine, Oxford University shares the work they’re pursuing to identify potential drug candidates to combat COVID-19.
Sky News Business Editor, Ticky Fullerton, also sits down with those driving the new Australia including Treasurer Josh Frydenberg, National COVID-19 Commission (Advisory Board) Chairman Neville Power, Minister of Government Services Stuart Robert, IBM Australia/New Zealand Managing Director Katrina Troughton and Woodside CEO Peter Coleman.
At every stage, the digital transformation realised by business, government and academia has achieved years of work in a matter of months. In what ways will we emerge smarter from this pandemic, what jobs will be available to Australians, and how will technology such as AI, supercomputing and quantum computing power our progress as we recover and live in a world beyond COVID-19?
Targeted Media
With high impact placements on the homepage and app takeovers, we also sought to maximise contextually relevant placements ensured audience engagement, becoming a useful part of the digital experience wherever possible, rather than a distraction.
Overall display activity across The Australian, news.com.au and News DNA over delivered significantly, delivering more than 33 million advertising impressions to convert content readers, and created 136,000 new leads for IBM in the process.
