Today, there are hundreds of blogs, newsreaders, magazines and platforms that do their best to give an overview of the immensely fragmented art world. But they all fall short when it comes to providing full transparency, guidance, high-quality content, and added value.

UBS Global Art Sponsorship wanted to extend their brand presence beyond traditional sponsorship touchpoints, building on their 20-year commitment to the contemporary art. Their brief was simple: create a digital service that will help art lovers and experts alike enter, participate and understand the contemporary art world.

The objectives in creating such a platform were twofold:

-Engage an art interested public in the UBS brand and provide them with value added services for contemporary art

-Boost the innovative brand value perception of UBS

Planet Art scours a broad range of sources, from mainstream media outlets to specialized websites and blogs. Utilizing state-of-the-art NLP and machine learning, an intelligent algorithm searches and matches relevant tags such as artists, galleries, events, locations and more.

A data-led similarity engine identifies clusters connections, and accumulations between tags, and presents these in a qualified and objective ranked stream of articles.

The algorithm constantly fine-tunes the ranking, meaning there is always an up-to-date, comprehensive and valuable overview of the most important trending topics in the art world.

UBS Planet Art was launched in beta for iPad in December 2014 to an exclusive audience in the UBS VIP Lounge at Art Basel Miami Beach. Since then, Planet Art has been released on additional platforms and a wider audience at other Art Basel events and activated through paid media promotion.

Global release timeline:

iPad, December 2014

iPhone, March 2015

Android (Tablet and Smartphone), March 2016

The latest release to Android devices in March 2016 solidifies Planet Art’s hold of the Asian market.

In the future, Planet Art will be expanded into an ecosystem of intelligent digital tools for the contemporary art world, with the mobile app as a centerpiece.