News Corp’s first party tech build is now at point where the publisher will match spend from customers using its new platform and run it in parallel with a standard cookie-based approach to prove it delivers much bigger reach and more sales.
Via a “privacy compliant” approach using its first party data and data matching via the likes of Google, LiveRamp, Adobe, InfoSum and AdFixus alongside its more commerce-focused websites, News can find buyers who are ready to buy specific products. Hence calling the new stack Intent Connect. Director of Commercial Data, Video & Product, Paul Blackburn, says one “large supermarket” – flip a coin – has increased spend “3,000 per cent” after trialling Intent Connect. GM of Digital Revenue, Mark Brownie, cites tests with “a major insurance company” that used News’ “self-learning, self-optimising segments” to boost acquisition by 199 per cent versus cookies. “We’re not talking about vanity media metrics, we’re talking about hard sales,” per Blackburn.
Plus, log-level attribution benchmarking, says National Head of Digital, Jess Gilby, “shows 197 per cent increase in reported reach, which is huge, and 10 per cent higher conversion rates - and we're just getting started”.
Those reach gains are because News’ can now measure across browsers that have already killed off cookies – basically the other half of the internet.
Meanwhile, offsite targeting is growing rapidly after News launched vertical video products – AKA shorts – basically the same formats as social media, which means buyers can use the same ads across both social and News’ sites to extend reach without having to do everything twice. Buyers are buying in.
“Our total video stream number is around the 4 billion mark – and 3 billion of those are happening outside of our owned and operated environments,” says Brownie.
Plus, it’s going hyper local – using the log-ins from 100 local mastheads to enable stores to “upload lists of their outlets and automatically generated audiences based on that data,“ says Brownie. “That's really powerful from a pure addressability standpoint, but it also tells a retailer a tonne of stuff about their existing or future customers in those areas, and the nuances between the different locations.”
