Mobile exchange Australian Premium Exchange (APEX) has entered into a partnership with Qantas Loyalty’s Red Planet to offer advertisers access to data derived from its Qantas Frequent Flyer program.
APEX – a joint-venture between Fairfax Media and Nine and powered by AppNexus – will see the publisher alliance “enrich its premium advertising inventory” by combining data from QFF as well as other sources to offer “high quality, audience segments at scale”.
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Red Planet – which launched in September 2014 – will provide APEX with de-identified consumer data such as attitudes, behaviours, demographics, interests and transactional data, and includes travel and general spending insights from the Qantas Loyalty portfolio.
It is supplemented with insights from Red Planet’s 100,000 member research panel.
Speaking with Mumbrella, APEX CEO Pippa Leary said following on from the launch of APEX was a number of potential strategic partners and tech vendors.
Pippa Leary: This is the first step in the journey towards APEX 2.0
“We’ve spent the past year evaluating lots of those partners and that incoming tech, and what it meant we could come up with was a real strategic road-map for what APEX 2.0 needed to be,” she said.
“One of the first things we realised we needed to do was we needed to bring in data that was very complementary to our offer.”
Leary said one of the first learnings for APEX was “just like not all digital inventory is created equal, not all data is created equal”.
“When we came across the Red Planet guys and they started talking about their data it was like: ‘this is what we’ve been looking for’.
“These guys have a very large pool of deterministic data, with those 11.5m logged-in, authenticated Qantas Frequent Flyer users.”
Leary said Red Planet can reach into a number of other Qantas products for data sources including Travel Money Card, Assure and Aquire.
“On top of that they can reach into Data Republic. What that actually brought to the table for us was a large amount of differentiated segments that were based on consumer drivers of choice as well as payments and basket data. It was much more intelligent data for us.”
Qantas has a stake in Data Republic allowing Red Planet to draw out grocery data.
Leary said the partnership with Red Planet was a “necessary first step”.
“This is the first cab off the rank for APEX moving from 1.0 to 2.0. It was a very necessary first step in the next part of the journey.”
The Red Planet segment data will be available through Fairfax Media and Nine Entertainment’s own private marketplaces (PMPs), as well as APEX.
Fairfax Media commercial and marketing services director Tom Armstrong said: “One of our key aims when creating APEX was to set up a beachhead of innovation in the programmatic advertising sector.
“We believe this landmark Red Planet partnership demonstrates our commitment to driving programmatic excellence and creating a unique combination of premium inventory and consumer data for advertisers.”
Nine’s chief digital and marketing officer Alex Parsons said: “‘Data partnerships, such as this deal with Red Planet, help us ensure we are able to offer a deep level of consumer insight that advertisers require.
“It is the combination of world class content, real audiences and deep data that provides us, through partnerships such as APEX, an additional competitive advantage in the ability to communicate to consumers at scale in brand safe environments.”