News Corp Australia adds suite of new data and tech offerings to tap the ‘entire funnel’
News Corp Australia is rolling out a suite of new tracking, intent and attribution measurement features across its network of media channels, in addition to a new ecommerce integration.
The new offerings were officially launched today at its D_Coded digital marketing event in Sydney.
This includes the launch of Intent Connect powered by the company’s Commercial Customer Data Platform, complimenting first-party content consumption data with data from its majority owned Foxtel Group and REA Group. The platform will include 5,000 customer segments, a significant advancement on the previous capability of 3,500 segments.
The new technology-backed offerings will see News Corp Australia also become the first publisher to partner with Westpac DataX to provide clients with insight into more than 12 million customers and 6 million daily card transactions through aggregated, de-identified data.
Managing director, client product, Pippa Leary told Mumbrella that the business had increased investment in its data science “to shift focus from past consumer behaviours to modelling and predicting their future intentions”.
“Being able to identify audiences is absolutely key, the DataX info that we are getting from Westpac is incredibly important for that,” she said.
“Also incredibly important is the work we have done internally to look at our own first-party data, to zero in on intent, and future intent. It’s no use us saying to clients well, last week this many people searched for your product or looked at this or that, we have to be able to say that next week 800,000 women are going to come to News.com.au and they intend to buy lipstick, what is the message you want to say to them to get them at this point.”
Intent Connect focuses on identifying consumer intent by collating audience insights, content, media targeting, measurement and attribution capabilities and putting all of the data into a single, purpose-built platform.
News Corp Australia managing director, national sales, Lou Barrett said Intent Connect would provide marketers with marketing’s most in-demand commodity, intent. “At News Corp Australia, we can turn audience engagement into client outcomes, which is why we’ve focused on helping our partners anticipate audience needs at the moments that matter, the next purchase.”
According to head of Westpac DataX, Jade Clarke, through Westpac’s comprehensive transactional data insights, advertisers will be able to more effectively identify, create and connect with their target audiences, “supporting more efficient allocation of marketing spend and better planning”.
Both Barrett and Leary told Mumbrella that in all of the work done to integrate these offerings for clients, one thing has become clear, marketers should not be tempted to put all of the marketing dollars just at the end of the funnel where ROI is easy to measure.
“It can get very tempting to spend all of your money at the lower end of the funnel where you can prove RO,” Leary said. “But what we have learnt doing all of this work, is you have to spend at the top of the funnel also… what we are excited about is that we feel that we have a full suite of solutions from the top to the bottom now, and we can work as a strategic partner with our clients.
“There is a lot of noise at the moment about being able to tie impression level data with skew data. And that is brilliant. But you actually have to get someone to be a high intent shopper before you can even do that, and that is what all the rest of the funnel does.
News Corp Australia’s third-parry partners
As part of its Total Commerce solution News Corp Australia will implement a new integrated offering, co-developed with Vudoo. The Total Commerce offering enables consumers to click on video, text, or images, to initiate and complete a transaction and seamlessly continue on their content journey. Retailers retain full control over the relationship with their customers, including pricing, stock control, delivery and fulfilment, payments, and personal details through their chosen e-commerce stack.
Leary said the company’s Total Commerce proposition marked an important evolution in the publisher’s offering to clients.
“We are turning ourselves from billboard to an integrated shopfront; [and] it’s this technology that is allowing us to do that,” said Leary. “And you have got to have all of the technology to do that.”
News Corp Australia will use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to create matches between a client’s products and content across the News Corp Australia network.
“Once they [consumers] are on our network and within our content, when we show them something that they want to buy we want to make it frictionless… where people can see a product and buy it within the content. They no longer need to leave.
“We can create shoppable display ads and shoppable native ads, which we can then programmatically amplify both on and off network, and say to our clients, ‘you can take that piece of content’ and you can put it on your own owned media.
By way of example Leary said the technology would detect a consumer reading a story about fitness techniques in Body+Soul, then insert the most relevant and best fitness products from a retailer’s catalogue as widgets that will surround the article. Leary said the technology worked for big retailers through to the smallest.
Leary said that viewers would see more evergreen service journalism, “more ‘how to’s and explainers etc” that sit next to breaking news, as part of the ecommerce offering expansion.
News Corp has also launched a new partnership with video effectiveness platform Adgile. The advanced offering provides independent measurement solutions to prove the efficacy of client investment with brand, footfall and sales measures, as part of a commitment to transaction-based outcomes and return-on-ad-spend.
“It doesn’t matter if it is a digital outcome or a real world outcome, our attribution suite is designed to measure effectiveness,” Barrett told Mumbrella.
She added that in the current economic environment, clients needed to remember that it is important to maintain investment in marketing, but to do it where they can see the effectiveness.
“They [marketers] need to be more aware than ever before of where they put their marketing dollars, it’s not as easy as just throwing your money into TV anymore, you need to be more strategic about that and you need to be able to prove effectiveness.
News Corp Australia launched its own above the line marketing campaign across its various publications last week, titled Get a read on | today’ via Today the Brave.
“We are putting our money where our mouth is,” Barrett told Mumbrella. “It would be terrible for me to sit up there and say ‘don’t cut your budget’ if we were not spending any money ourselves. The timing is perfect.”
News Corp Australia also announced a data clean room solution with UK software company InfoSum, the first Australian publisher to offer this solution.
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Olivia Kruimel is the managing editor at Mumbrella. She has more than 15 years of experience in journalism, communications and marketing. Her journalism career began at Fairfax Media (now part of Nine) and includes various B2B publications such as B&T, Travel Today and ALB. As a marketer Olivia has worked for Standard Chartered and various global law firms.
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