News Corp Australia strengthens audience data with new capabilities and digital ad solutions
Via special lunch presentations News Corp Australia last week announced new data capabilities and digital advertising solutions to significantly enhance the digital offering for clients.
Speaking at Decoded, News Corp Australia’s third virtual marketing event for advertising, marketing and media executives, managing director of national sales, Lou Barrett said: “With clients increasingly moving to targeted marketing, quality attention and how you earn it is critical. It is one thing to reach an audience but holding their attention and then providing verified measurement is what marketers want today.
“I’m thrilled to announce new data partnerships for audience targeting and enhancements to our digital offering. These showcase our unique and unrivalled combination of attention, context and connection to deliver outcomes for our partners.
“Our data partnerships are matched against our own first party data so that we are insulated against the demise of third party cookies in regards to our own network. We are continually evolving our advertising capabilities to meet clients’ needs.”
The new data will be available through News Corp Australia’s digital marketing platform, News Connect and comprise:
Automotive data – Marketers will be able to understand and target Australian households intending to purchase new and used vehicles through a new partnership with smrtr. Built using genuine transaction data, the predictive models cover over 270 unique makes, models and car segments and achieve, on average, 12 times improved targeting effectiveness. Importantly, this will enable marketers to distinctly target the ‘exploring’ phase which has been identified as the most important phase of the buying journey.
Supermarket data – Marketers will be able to understand, target and measure the supermarket buying habits of more than 75 percent of Australians through News Connect and a new data partner, allowing them to connect with new and existing customers.
Transaction data – Marketers will have access to data from the largest payment provider in Australia. With 160 million transactions every hour, covering 40 percent of Australian credit card holders, it will provide substantial new data sets, resulting in more than 100 new segments targeting both Top Spenders and Frequent Spenders across a range of product categories.
General manager of data and ad product Suzie Cardwell said: “News Connect is one of the strongest and richest commercial datasets in the market. We’re excited to secure these new data and insights partnerships that will significantly enhance the quality of News Connect’s targeting throughout the entire customer decision making process, from initial awareness to consideration and purchase.
“Marketers will be able to use the most powerful real world action signals, the amount and frequency of spend across a wide range of product categories, to understand and target new or existing customers.
“Understanding when, how and what customers buy on a de-identified basis, combined with News Connect insights – why they buy – enables marketers to target their consumers at the perfect moment with the perfect message to dramatically improve marketing effectiveness and outcomes.”
News Connect collects two billion data points from News Corp Australia websites and apps, as well as from partnerships. With 15 key partners – including Near, flybuys, Qantas Red Planet, realestate.com.au, Fox Sports, productreview.com.au, smrtr, TEG and more – News Connect offers more than 2,700 segments where marketing partners are able to find any audience, particularly intenders.
News Connect finds the right customer by layering first party audience data with trusted partner data. It then targets those audiences in News Corp Australia’s premium publisher environments where audiences spend 53 percent more time than the nearest commercial competitor (Nielsen). This combination of targeted audiences with high levels of engagement deliver outcomes for marketers.
Additional digital solutions announced include:
Enhancements to News Connect including new Premium Insights Dashboards. Offering clients access to advanced audience consumption data and insights, marketers can build a clearer picture of Australian consumer behaviour and their target audiences, with the additional power of being able to activate and measure from within the News Connect platform.
A Digital Catalogue Suite was announced, highlighting News Corp Australia’s suite of digital catalogue advertising options including the new Catalogue Connect ad format. With increasing pressure to transition catalogues from print to digital, marketers can now select from a range of digital catalogue ad formats to achieve their objectives.
Following the successful launch of Targeted Time in View in September 2020, which allows advertisers to buy blocks of time with their target consumer, the company announced further improvements to attention trading with new audiences for the product – including state-based targeting, metro or regional Australia and credit/finance, business decision makers and more.