So convinced is News Corp that it has cracked the code on beating “signal loss” from online users in a creaking third party cookie regime that it will offer market wide dollar-for-dollar test and learn experiments for advertisers wanting to compare results from its “Intent Connect” audience targeting and planning platform against cookie-based campaigns across the open web. 

The publisher says it can unravel purchase cycles of online users in specific categories from its five-year investment in first party audience data blended with cookie alternative user ID initiatives and consumer spending feeds from the likes of Westpac X.

The piece of code dropped on user browsers allowing cookie owners to track and analyse individual user browsing patterns has already seen at least 40 per cent of all online global users go dark thanks to adblockers and most web browsers outlawing the practice – except, repeatedly, Google Chrome. 

As most companies still work out how to break their 15-year cookie dependency for user targeting and measuring online marketing performance, News Corp’s Holt St headquarters is preparing to launch its annual D-Coded product roadshow next week armed with what it says is a system-wide antidote for the signal loss from cookies today – and more so after Google, eventually, sunsets their use on Chrome, which controls circa 60 per cent of worldwide browsers.

News Corp’s head of commercial data, video and product, Paul Blackburn told Mi3 “on average you’re getting up to four times the return on ad spend versus standard practices today”. It’s a big claim but News Corp is about to back itself in dollar-for-dollar experiments with advertisers to prove large-scale first-party data investments from publishers like News Corp – which also gave a rare nod to arch-rival Nine Publishing – are better positioned than they were under a burning cookie regime.

“What you're looking at is around 50 per cent of the internet that is more or less not accessible by current targeting methodologies like cookies,” Blackburn said. “While Google has given the cookie a stay of execution, it’s probably unacceptable for digital marketers that [half] of the internet is not accessible to them. We're working with this concept of signal gain – that is we use privacy compliant, cookieless solutions to understand user behaviours and gain signals from those users. They come from the interactions our audience has with our content, those deep contextual environments that give us a really strong signal of what consumers are interested in, and even what they're about to shop.”

Performance play

News Corp’s strategy is clearly aiming to tap surging demand from brands in the current consumer spending contraction to link marketing efforts directly to a commercial transaction or outcome. Blackburn said the publisher’s new “turbocharged” data capabilities allowed it to put advertisers in front of 17 million individuals when they're close to a purchase decision or a transaction, based on their content behaviour across the News Corp portfolio. He said initiatives like news.com.au’s “Checkout” and “Escape Deals” for travel are "really strong signals for someone's intent” to buy a particular product or service. 

“In some of the recent tests, we've seen a large supermarket brand shift large sums of money off the open exchanges – we had a 3,000 per cent increase in spend from one big retailer through programmatic guaranteed channels using this new signal gain approach. And that's because they are getting the results.” Blackburn cited an unnamed travel advertiser in early trials that saw a 67 per cent lift in interaction rates on their videos versus cookie-based open web campaigns. 

Signal gain?

“What we're able to do with our Buy Now segments is take those really high quality signals that we've got with people looking for holidays, or looking for a deal on news.com.au to a customer match with advertiser first party data, then use our CDP [customer data platform] and our data science capability to model our self-learning, self-optimising segments," per Blackburn.

"They're looking for those signals in real time of someone that is coming into the market, and is ready to buy now. It's has performance built in, privacy built in and they’re cookieless from the outset. We’ve got large financial institutions that are seeing huge increases with us around customer acquisition – we're not talking about vanity media metrics, we're talking about actual sales. What you get is something magical," he suggested.

"We're seeing advertisers getting up to four times the return on ad spend, on average, versus the standard practices today using cookies.”

Too good to be true? Blackburn said even Google is finding similar effectiveness gains in non-cookie trials.