Almost four years after it first appeared, 7REDiQ has become one of the leading media company data platforms in Australia, with a huge customer base, an ever-growing array of data partnerships and a steady stream of innovations. 

Seven calls 7REDiQ a “data visualisation platform that turns assumptions into knowledge about your audience”. In short, it helps marketers understand consumer behaviours, motivations and brand affinities. And it’s evolving, with deeper data partnerships and the addition of predictive audience data. 

Here, Seven’s Network Digital Sales Director, Rachel Page, and Head of Commercial Data and Programmatic, Dean La Rosa, talk about what’s to come and – more importantly – what marketers want from 7REDiQ and other data platforms.  

Q: Let's start at the start: what’s the best way to describe 7REDiQ? 

Dean: At its core, 7REDiQ is a web-based dashboard that visualises and surfaces all the insights that exist within our data warehouse using the billions of data points that we collect across our network. That includes all of our own first party signals, but then enhanced with the data partnerships that we bring to market. 

Q: Billions of data points?  

Dean: Yes, billions. It’s everything from the different devices that are used to consume the content on our network through to the actual content that's being consumed, down to how frequently and how recently people are consuming that content. It runs from the Seven and 7plus shows that we know people love to watch through to the different data partnerships we have with Flybuys, Equifax, Visa, Landmarks ID and the companies in the Seven West Ventures group like Raiz Invest and CarExpert. We’re building out a really rich profile of an audience that a brand can curate based on any number of those data points that we collect and understand their real-world behaviours. 

Q: Every media company says it has the best or biggest (or both) data platform. What’s so special about 7REDiQ?  

Rachel: For me, there's a few core areas that differentiate 7REDiQ from the platform pack. First, it's the depth and breadth of those different insights that we can surface. Yes, it’s about leveraging all the first party signals, but also enriching that with some of the leading data partners in the market. It means we can unearth category-leading insights. Our platform can be used in a very transferable way, that is, it can be used to support a wider marketing plan. It doesn't necessarily need to be used with Seven’s media channels. For example, the geolocation data and other insights can be used to support and extend to a digital out of home campaign. 

Also, it’s all underpinned by privacy-preserving technology. It’s great way to champion the protected use of data. We know how important that is, and it's only going to become more important later in the year as the Government expedites privacy and data reform. 7REDiQ is built for the future, and we're already well prepared for some of those changes. 

Dean: Firstly, the platform actually exists! It's not a hype reel or words on a page. Based on its functionalities, one of the key points of difference for 7REDiQ is that the insights that are surfaced in the platform are all actionable. We can create audience segments, or more importantly, marketers and agencies can curate their own audience profiles to then activate across our network.

We already have a number of clients including some large insurance and financial service brands using the platform to garner more insights for their existing audience segmentations and support their overall marketing plan and creative development. There is a misconception that 7REDiQ is solely a Seven tool, but make no mistake, it is a marketing planning and insights tool. 

Rachel: Another key point of difference lies in the combination of historical 7REDiQ data and insights and the predictive audience information we are getting through our work with 7 AI Predictive Audiences. It’s a powerful and unique combination, something no one else can match – the past and the present, together. It’s every planner and buyer’s nirvana. 

Q: How impacted will 7REDiQ be when cookies disappear? 

Dean: Very little. As a business, we have been working towards a cookie-less world for about four years now. When Google finally turns them off, we won’t miss a beat. We've already fully migrated away from a reliance on third party cookies internally across all our platforms.

Q: At a very top-line level, what do clients want from 7REDiQ and is it delivering the solutions they need?  

Rachel: Everybody, in every industry, is overloaded with data and insights solutions these days so the most important thing to our partners and agencies is simplification and ease of trade. How do we make it easier? 7REDiQ is an amazing and simplified dashboard with four years of learnings from 13.7 million registered 7plus users. Then add in our third-party audiences and insights from partners in different categories, which enhances our own learnings. Ease of trade and easy to buy are really important considerations for marketers and agencies, so we are working on ways to make that work even better. Can’t say too much right now, apart from watch this space.  

The insights from 7REDiQ are very, very powerful. Of course, we’d like marketers and agencies to give us 100 per cent of their budgets. But that isn’t going to happen, so we want them to be able to use information from 7REDiQ to inform and drive their entire marketing plan. That’s how we position Seven for success: not as a sales team but as a strategic partner.  

Q: Talk for a bit about the recent extension of the Visa partnership?  

Dean: We’re the only media business to offer customer insights from Visa. Put simply, marketers can leverage the data to target and understand audiences across Seven’s digital platforms, based on their transactional history. Our partnership with Visa provides the single most in-demand dataset for advertisers in Seven’s arsenal. We’ve just extended the partnership and expanded our data to include three new, highly valuable segments: luxury brands and stores, SMB owners and seasonal shoppers. It makes the Visa partnership even more valuable for our customers. 

Q: What's the focus for 7REDiQ over the next 12 months?  

Dean: Predictive audience data is a key focus for the next year. Until now, 7REDiQ has been a look into the past – an incredibly valuable and useful look, but the past, nonetheless. What we are now adding is a crystal ball into the future.  

We can curate a high-value audience based on thousands of different filters that are available in the 7REDiQ platform. As part of that, we know how many users sit in the Seven world. But what we also want to be able to do is predict how many of those people are going to be with Seven in the next seven, 14 and 28 days. We don’t just want to tell the market how many credit card intenders or QSR shoppers we have matched; the real opportunity for us and for marketers and agencies is to understand which of those people will be consuming our content in the immediate future so we can get brands in front of them.

As privacy reform lands, advertisers will also need a privacy-compliant avenue to leverage their data. The partnerships we’ve recently struck with Karlsgate and AdFixus, both of which are privacy-driven technologies, will solve those exact challenges.  

Rachel: 7REDiQ has been generating great results for our customers. We want to share its power more broadly. We want to put the power of 7REDiQ in the hands of our agencies and clients, so that they do start to use it as an extended marketing tool and planning tool versus just a Seven tool. That's absolutely where we want it to go and grow.