What you need to know

• SCA's own CDP implementation is delivering strong benefits, such as growing customer acquisition and retention on its Listnr app through improved customer experiences, and more efficient and effective media spend.
• The timing is perfect with digital audio now Australia's fastest-growing media category, according to recent IAB figures.
• And there's plenty of capacity for growth. People spend about four hours a day on audio services, says SCA chief commercial officer Seb Rennie, but the category so far is only capturing about 6 per cent of ad revenues.
• SCA's executive head Listnr, commercial , Olly Newton expects the number of digital audio campaigns utilising data matching to double by the end of the year.
• Data cleans that let buyers and sellers share data, irrespective of which potential CDPs they are using will play a major role.
• SCA is already reaping dividends from its tech with the cost to per install new Listnr subscribers slashed by 60 per cent.
• For its part, SCA expects its Adtech Hub, launched last week and described as 'an exclusive new advertising technology suite of innovations and services' to deliver it a serious competitive advantage.

SCA is about to parlay learnings from its success generating business value through its customer data platform (CDP) from more efficient media spending into better advertising outcomes for its customers courtesy of a data clean room that will allow brands to connect their own CDPs to the media company's.

Since implementing its CDP, the ASX-listed media company has identified several powerful insights. For instance, according to chief commercial officer Seb Rennie: “If we can get a radio user to add a podcast to their repertoire, they're going to be 81 per cent more likely to be retained as a user three months later.”

He made the comments in an MI3 Australia Market Voice podcast last week.

On the media spend side, Rennie cited a 60 per cent reduction in the cost to acquire new members over the 18 months SCA has been using the CDP to help inform its marketing strategy.

Audio-based media is enjoying strong success at the moment, according to the latest IAB reports. While digital media as a whole returned a subdued growth rate of 3.7 per cent, digital audio is roaring, growing at 20.6 per cent. It's even outstripping video, which is growing at a still impressive 14.5 per cent.

“We are coming off a slightly lower base," Rennie acknowledged. “But in terms of the momentum we're growing, we've consistently been the number one fastest-growing media type throughout last year. Then if I look at the December quarter, digital audio is up 38.4 per cent.”

The immutable law of advertising is dollars follow the audience. And in that regard, there is potentially a lot of growth already baked in assuming companies like SCA can execute well.

“People are spending about a third of their time or roughly four hours a day with audio, yet only 6 per cent of ad revenues coming towards the medium," Rennie told Mi3.

His SCA colleague and executive head Listnr, commercial, Olly Newton, believes first-party data will prove a powerful allure for clients. According to Newton, a typical omni-channel DSP right now sees about 10 to 15 per cent of digital audio campaigns doing some type of data matching. By the end of the year, that will have doubled to between 25 and 30 per cent, he said.

“What you'll also see is that by the end of the year, the majority of digital audio briefs will be asking media owners what their first-party data strategy is, and what their adtech capability is. And I don't think that's going to go backward - I think that's going to keep increasing as we move towards total cookie deprecation," Newton said.

Makeover

As part of what SCA described as the biggest makeover to Listnr since it launched in 2021, the media group has unveiled Adtech Hub, its exclusive new advertising technology suite of innovations and services. The development comes in response to fairly clear feedback from its audience.

While listeners love the variety of music stations, the quality of the audio content and the usability of the app, feedback also revealed a key pain point in navigation.

"There was so much content. Users are really looking for a way to be able to guide it through and, and identify areas of interest to them," Rennie said.

Based on a better understanding of audience needs and experiences, SCA identified two key areas where it wanted to double down as part of this new release: Discoverability and findability.

“So within the app, we've optimised the homepage navigation and the overall user experience. Secondly, we wanted to focus on personalisation," Rennie explained. "That means we use the listening behaviour and data points we're gathering from our user base, and make sure we can serve up new content based on that data.”

Personalisation strategies

Personalisation has been baked into the Listnr app for some time courtesy of the CDP. Now, the data platform is being extended out to partners and customers. As Mi3 reported last year, SCA began building the Listnr app from scratch six years ago, keeping everything in-house.

At the time, the firm already had a strong digital presence through its Hit and Triple M apps, and had done a deal with US-firm Podcast One to enter podcasting. Consumption of digital audio was therefore already strong – in 2019, circa 8.8m people were consuming digital audio “either daily, weekly or monthly,” per Nikki Clarkson, SCA's CMO. “So it was a robust category already.”

But Clarkson told Mi3 SCA needed to bring everything together. That meant aligning the entire business to work out the plan of attack, thrashing out the strategic roadmap, and then delivering on the run, all without dropping the ball on its day-to-day game in a market where media stocks can be punished excessively. According to Clarkson, that business-wide process, involving a “cross-functional team across sales, content, marketing, product, technology and research”, was critical to SCA’s success.

It's a point not lost on Rennie, who credited the efforts of Clarkson and her team. “The work they've done really highlights some of the opportunities marketers have to activate campaigns really effectively on the platform," he said. "The first one is really quite a simple strategy. We know who our users are and by suppressing them when we target advertising off-platform, we reduce wastage. I mean, it's kind of marketing 101 in a lot of ways.

“When we move outside pure acquisition, we can look at more insight-led campaigns based on listeners' consumption and behaviour from the CDP. That helps us to create everything from creative messaging through to campaign strategy from a media mix perspective.”

That translates into more effective and efficient audience acquisition and retention, “because we're really surfacing up the constant that they know and love,” said Rennie.

The next step is to apply these wins to help commercial partners.

Three big bets

SCA has taken three big bets, each of which is designed to help brands and agencies navigate 2024. These include increased personalisation and targeting, extensive dynamic creative optimisation, and an Australian-based CDP plus first-party data clean room solutions and services.

“What we've essentially done is broken down our adtech capability and launched three key initiatives that underpin how we think the digital advertising market is going to move this year, and what brands and agencies want from a digital audio solution,” Rennie said.

The first is dynamic creative optimisation. “We've built a really rich first-party data strategy and that means we can start targeting people at an age, a demography, or a geography-based level media campaign."

However, that’s just the beginning. According to Newton, “We've moved forward and started connecting up APIs.”

As a practical example, financial indicators such as fuel pricing can inform new opportunities for advertisers. The third element is called live context.

“Within the app itself, it's got the capability to know what people are doing," Newton said. "For example, we know if someone's working from home, we understand if they're commuting and what generates creative opportunities. So an advertiser can come to us with a set brief that might target people working from home with a food delivery service. If you're commuting, and you're on your way home, here's another message. If you're on your way into the city, here's another message.”

Contextual advertising

Richer contextual targeting is also available thanks to data insights.

“Across our entire network of over 900 podcasts, we've now got the technology that enables us to understand the subjects that are being discussed," Newton told Mi3. "We know podcasting is a really trusted medium. People love listening to their favourite podcasts, and they really relate to whoever they're listening to. If you've got a trusted voice talking about going on holiday, or going and staying somewhere, it gives us the opportunity to then drop in an ad specific to that particular category.”

The jewel in the crown – and the subject of a major announcement from the business last week – is the data clean room. SCA said it has launched multiple data clean room solutions.

“We want to be completely CDP agnostic. There's now over 20 CDPs being run out of Australia. Every media company needs a strategy of how they can work with these CDPs and enable more efficient advertising solutions off the back of it," Newton said.

“Our CDP is Salesforce, which enables us to find audiences and match audiences through Salesforce. But that's not enough. You have to be agnostic to whatever data advertisers and agencies want to work with.”

Education imperative

To ensure its partners are able to make the most of the opportunity, SCA will provided a managed services solution - contrary to the prevailing approach of the Big Techs who have been pushing clients into self service.

Per Newton: "I think it's widely known that the majority of global tech businesses have removed resource from Australian media in the last 12 months. And we're really doubling down in this area, because we feel that we've only really scratched the surface with digital audio. In every major agency partnership brief for 2024, there's huge enthusiasm to lean in, there's huge enthusiasm to learn about the capabilities, and that's to go on a journey with them. So the logical solution is to offer these as a managed service."

According to Rennie, “With a managed service, you effectively become an extension of the team that are purchasing the media. What that leads to is a much more consultative process.

“We're much more aligned on the objectives of the campaign, we can identify what the challenges may be. And importantly, we can identify troubleshooting and optimisation collaboratively.”

Every dollar

When Mi3 spoke with another SCA executive recently, he described in blunt terms the importance the company now places on a first-data platform for its own marketing. “Every fucking dollar now goes through the CDP.”

By the end of 2024, SCA expects a lot more partner dollars to join them.