‘Turning data into human truth’ – how Pacific is leading the future of audience intelligence
Pacific's Seventh Sense collects, collates and curates the social, location and transactional data of over 9.6 million Australians. Even better, it transforms the data into insights that are 100% actionable.
In 2016, Nicole Bence had a conundrum. With more than 15 years’ experience in the media, she was renowned for her sales, marketing and commercial strategy expertise, in both digital and print. But when Pacific approached her to join, despite her love for magazines, she was conflicted.
“I had to ask myself, did I think magazines could continue to play the upfront, pivotal role in Australian culture they always had?” she posed to the Mumbrella360 audience.
“Despite all of the audience intelligence that magazine channels had, they seemed to be lacking conversion. But I felt that there was a massive opportunity for us to change that; an opportunity for us to evolve the way we use data and insights and, ultimately, Pacific agreed. It was the collective passion shown by senior leaders within the company to lead that which made it a really easy decision.”
Now, as Commercial Director at Pacific, Bence has made it her mission to ensure the company remains at the forefront of an ever-changing media landscape. More than that, Bence and Pacific are looking to use the company’s cutting-edge audience intelligence to accelerate growth and shape products, becoming an increasingly trusted influence.
“It really formed part of my daily obsession,” says Bence. “And I was so excited to be a part of a company that genuinely wanted to put data and insights at the heart of every decision it made. For commercial, for marketing and for content.”
Finding new audiences
In addition to her quest to drive Pacific’ market position, Bence is also tasked with finding new audiences. In a noisy, hyper-connected world that sees activities such as phoning a friend, going to yoga and scanning Instagram as competing activities for magazine consumption, Bence admits an ongoing goal for the publisher is to ensure its brands and platforms maintain and improve relevance within pop culture, while also attracting new high value, cost-effective audiences through the better use of data and insights.
Data, is, of course, crucial to understanding audiences. But, as one client noted, “Often what data cannot do… is tell you the motivation.” Or can it? For an organisation such as Pacific that sells upwards of 40 million magazines each year, with a retail distribution network that counts 4,000 stores, harnessing data has the power to boost the bottom line as well as optimise the customer experience.
“This is why we have a purpose-built platform which collects, assembles and distributes valuable consumer data to our marketing, subscription and retail teams,” said Bence. “Our objective is to put the customer at the centre of the journey, and while we have a lot of data and information, our challenge is the growing need to link our internal consumer insights with external retail transactional data sets to demonstrate the power and value of our brands.”
Enter Seventh Sense
More than a year in the making, Bence proudly explains that the result, Seventh Sense, is a unique proposition. “It not only provides you with the right person at the right time – just like Facebook and Google – but it gives you the right context, too. It considers content in the context of emotion.”
Characterising the new platform as a best-in-class opportunity, Bence notes that Seventh Sense is really about the collision of data, culture and insights. She said, “It takes deep category insights and edited intuition into the modern world of connected IDs, creating a unique audience intelligence that unlocks the value of data to drive business growth in a contextually and culturally relevant world.”
Unlike the majority of data services that generate droves of information yet, critically, remain subjective and largely open to interpretation, what Seventh Sense does is truly innovative. “It helps brands better connect with audiences, drive marketing-led growth, and puts brands up front of competitors by turning data into that all-important human truth.”
How does it do it? By approaching its unique, rich collection of data like a publisher. For decades, Pacific has been telling stories to a colossal, paying audience. “We are, in fact, an audience business,” she insists. “One who knows how to engage audiences, create communities and leverage passion points.”
Indeed, long before Facebook or Twitter even existed, Pacific was steadily amassing a treasure trove of audience insights, with each individual data point telling its own story about the person behind it.
This is the root of the offering, Bence says. It’s not “a pixel or a cookie” that tells a brand’s story, rather “the human truth.” And bringing all of this together in a single, pioneering package, is Seventh Sense.
“The beauty of it, for your business, means that beyond offering our editorial skill to craft and curate content and connect your branding to our audiences, what we now bring is a level of audience intelligence that we give to content creators to make that connection even more powerful.”
An example of the power of Seventh Sense can be seen in the work Pacific has completed for an automotive client. With the average consumer experiencing 900 digital touch points on the path to purchase, Seventh Sense is able to take these interactions and produces a remarkable number of insights.
“For this particular client, when we ran the numbers, we could see that there were just over 570,000 active consumers in the market that we picked up via location data points,” she said.
When this data was compared to Seventh Sense’s connected ID platform, it was possible to determine that around 192,000 of those were women aged 25-to-54.
“When we looked at that again using location data, we could tell that about a quarter of these women had been into our client’s showroom. Furthermore, through Seventh Sense, we were able to deliver intelligence around how to effectively target high-value customers through the identification of a brand-new audience,” said Bence.
The results were startling – revealing a very specific type of customer that the client had previously ignored.
“She was an urbanite. She was under 30, she had no kids, she was semi-professional, she was on social media all the time,” explained Bence. “Very, very different to the audience that our client had been used to targeting. The outcome for this particular client was a whole new audience, with a whole new marketing strategy required.”
Targeting multiple verticals
The opportunity goes far beyond the automotive category with applications for fast moving consumer goods, and, more broadly, how the intel extends into retail and channel distribution.
Today, Seventh Sense is not only applied in Pacific’s brief response, but also through consultation and partnership opportunities.
Combining audience insights with inimitable data; fusing the social, location and transactional data of over 9.6 million Australians, the future looks bright for Seventh Sense and Pacific.
Suffice to say, Nicole Bence is not ruing her leap into the unknown. Rather, she and Pacific are driving innovation – pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in audience intelligence – and turning the idea of what it means to be a ‘traditional publisher’ on its head.
“We have, and always will create the best content,” Bence concluded. “But we’re on an exciting journey now, where we bring a level of data into our internal system that’s not only going to help you to better understand, connect and change the behaviour of your audiences, but ultimately give you the human truth you’re going to need to solve real business challenges and help get ahead of your competitors.”