CEO claims Nine’s new data division Tipstone puts Google in ‘second tier’
Nine Entertainment Co is spinning a new data division out of its Mi9 digital unit which it claims will be one of just two “top tier” providers in Australia, with anticipated revenues of $50m-$100m in the next three to five years.
Tipstone will sell data on users from Mi9’s suite of sites and data from partners including Microsoft, which is tracked from assets with logins such as Windows Live (formerly Hotmail), Xbox Live, Skype, Nine’s Jump In catch-up TV service and data tracking across other assets including NineMSN. The Mail Online data is not part of the offering.
This is then married up with offline data from a range of Roy Morgan surveys and sold to agencies and marketers for what new CEO Richard McLaren describes as a push to get marketers having “meaningful conversations” with their clients.
At a launch event yesterday in Sydney McLaren said Tipstone would be going head-to-head with data giant Quantium, which Woolworths took an equity stake in a year ago, when it goes live on July 1, describing Google as a “second tier” data provider, and the other major Australian publishers including Fairfax and News Corp as “third tier”.
“It’s the consistency of recognising a logged-in user account the others don’t have,” he said. He added the data would also be made available to agencies for programatic trading “over time”.
McLaren said the idea for the spinoff came from clients asking for access to data to improve their digital experiences. He added: “It’s about knowing whether people are more likely to buy this and that product and understand things like where they live, but there’s also other sides to data, like being able to find people at various touchpoints and making communications relevant.
“We hear a lot about the first one in terms of what we know about people, but a lot less about the second. And that’s because there really are only two data sets at any scale across Australia, and we are one of them. So when we talk about 14.5m IDs we’re talking about 70 per cent of the online population.”
The data has been married with Roy Morgan’s Helix Persona data, which has 56 customer profiles for different people, and clients will be able to buy the data sets out of the existing Roy Morgan tools.
He gave an example of a bank being able to tailor its online site with offers which would appeal to a certain type of individual the first time they visit a site, to serve up the sort of offers which would appeal to someone of their profile. Currently the vast majority of online assets serve a generic platform to all visitors.
Mi9 CEO Mark Britt said the company would also be able to be used by publishers to tailor their content to every visitor, so serve up that which is most likely to appeal to them. But he denied it was an admission by Nine Entertainment Co that media assets were a doomed business.
Michele Levine, CEO of Roy Morgan, told Mumbrella the partnership was important for the group, which has been under scrutiny since The Newspaper Works and Ipsos launched EMMA, a rival to its long-standing readership survey, last year, taking it beyond a planning tool and adding more value to their customers.
McLaren said the challenge for the group now was to educate marketers about the uses of data, adding: “It’s a simple thing, you’re putting relevant content to the right person at the right time, but it’s how you go about that which is complicated.”
The company launches with “seven or eight” staff from inside Mi9, but aims to grow to 25 to 30 staff over the year, and Tipstone will sit in the Nine family, with profits going to shareholders.
this reads like the Gruffalo.
How bout the users that are signed in to chrome ? there’s quite a few of them and with that, google has the capability to combine search (insanely accurate intention data) and browsing history and they’ve been at it for quite some time.
I really don’t get folks coming out with these grandiose statements at launch.
Best of luck.
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MI9 have been selling their data creds for a while now, just because you now house in under a new brand wont suddenly make it different and more successful.
As stated in the article seems they are giving up on their media biz. as this plays out it will commoditises all of their owned media assets, I can now buy a ‘tipstone’ audience profile and then place media off mi9 network at fraction of the cost. some short term gain but long term pain.
as an aside Tipstone sounds like something out of the ‘Bourne’ book and film franchise.
jacko
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Really big and brave statement by MI9
Roy Morgan data is so 1999. Plus isn’t roy morgan panel based data. Apart from postcode mapping to your logged-base, what else are you doing to improve accuracy of data? Plus registration postcode goes out of date as people move through different lifestages. It would be good to know how you guys are keeping this refreshed. As i haven’t changed by hotmail postcode in the 15 years and i have sinced moved areas at least 5 times.
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mmm, not sure Google is a second tier provider. Given about 12 million Australian people a month use YouTube, more use search, millions use an Android phones and no doubt log into Gmail, not to mention 30%+ of web browsing on a Chrome browser ….. I think the men and women from Mountain View know a little bit more about us than Mi9 and Roy Morgan but haven’t tried to create a separate business unit to flog the data – they just keep focussing on their core business of hoovering 50%+ of all online media spend in the market whilst the thousands of other players in the market fight over the rest.
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A great move by Mi9, talking to media agencies in the language that they use everyday. Best of luck.
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Google a second tier player vs Tipstone? Dream on…
let’s see, now: data from Windows Live , Xbox Live, Skype, the Jump In catchup tv app and Roy Morgan
or data from , Google search, gmail, youtube, google+, google news, google apps, google maps, google calandar, etc etc etc. No contest
He’s right about News and Fairfax being third tier players on data, though .
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Compete with Quantium (Q)? Chalk and cheese. Q manages (or has access to) the CRM systems of WOW and NAB, plus several other major brands. Estimated reach via 1st party data (actual purchases, super high integrity in terms of demo, geo etc.) = 11.5m de-duped. Tipstone/Morgan partnership is a combination of media registration, click-stream and recall (via a 130+-page hardcopy survey booklet). I appreciate the effort and thought that has gone into the development of Tipstone, but it has neither the gravitas or firepower of Quantium. Oh and one more word of advice, players like Quantium should be recognised as potential partners not competitors. Inflammatory language used in this release will only isolate Tipstone and make its offering redundant in a relatively short amount of time.
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Obvious question is why NEC are doing this and not MSFT – most of the data and scale comes from assets NEC doesn’t own (Skype, Xbox, Windows Live etc)
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Last I heard the guys at Quantium had 300 staff and were hiring another 100.
Not sure 7 or 8 staff with plans for 25 to 30 working with Roy Morgan panel data is going to have either Quantium or Google too concerned!
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Anyone in doubt of Roy Morgans relevance should take a look at Helix Personas. It’s a psychographic segmentation system built out of panel data. Once this is coupled with mi9 account level data, there’s nothing like this out there on Google. Plus Roy Morgans data is used by most if not all Australian media agencies for media planning and buying. Seems like a game changer to me!
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@Helix
Yeah, what a game changer! And what an independent observation!
Did you leave out the possessive apostrophes in an attempt to make you look suitably illiterate enough for the internet, or do you genuinely not know when they’re required?
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