IBM Granite: reaching developers and the C-suite through B2B influencer marketing

IBM needed its purpose-built LLM Granite to stand out to developers and C-suite decision-makers in a crowded AI market clouded by confusion about practical applications and scepticism toward vendor claims. The Goat Agency's insight was that a technically sophisticated audience trusts reputable developer and AI voices over brand messaging, and consumes tech content on consumer platforms as well as LinkedIn. Because Granite targets enterprise workloads, both the developers who would use it and the executives who would approve it had to be convinced, so IBM had to earn credibility rather than assert it.

The idea had seven developer and AI specialist creators, with a combined following of over 5 million, each build a real project with Granite and tell it in two parts, a Preview that sets up the project and a Reveal that shows the finished result. Selection ran through the agency's IBEX platform. Short-form video ran on LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram and YouTube Shorts, briefed on key messages but never scripted, amplified with paid media, with links to IBM.com and to platforms such as Hugging Face where developers already evaluate models.

Matching creator credibility to the audience carried an enterprise message generalist influencers could not, and the Preview then Reveal structure created a narrative gap, with Reveal posts out-performing Previews on engagement. The Goat Agency reports 43M impressions, 9M engagements and 68K link clicks, and was entered in the B2B category at the 17th Annual Shorty Awards. All figures come from the agency's own page and are not independently verified. No launch date, creator names, brand-perception measurement or commercial outcome is published, and the Shorty entry states no result.