Suppress this

During the early wave of Covid lockdowns four years ago, Nine and Adobe headlined the media group’s Upfronts showcase for 2021 with what at the time looked like a lucrative new frontier – “people-based marketing”.

Google and Meta were said to be writing lucrative business with big advertisers in customer matching capabilities – if a bank wanted to target its credit card customers on Facebook or YouTube with a home loan offer, its current mortgage customers would be taken off the target list, but credit card and savings account customers would be identified and matched via hashed email addresses with Facebook’s database and then targeted with the home loan offer.

Nine wanted some of that action and Adobe’s new product promised the broadcaster to do the same – advertisers could match, target or suppress their customer databases with 13 million logged-in users at the time on Nine’s digital assets through Adobe’s Audience Match platform. 

“This takes us to a new level. This is going to change the game,” declared Nine’s Chief Sales Officer Michael Stephenson at Nine’s Upfronts in September 2020. 

But the grand people-based marketing plans of Nine and Adobe flopped. Adobe’s Audience Match tech – essentially a cookie-based data management platform now being mothballed by most companies – was too early and untested but Nine did have bragging rights, being pitched as a world first for media.  

But as Nine’s team quickly discovered, advertisers were doing more big talking than fast walking on the customer matching initiatives at Meta and Google.

“We announced it at our upfronts and the next morning I anxiously got to work, sitting at my computer waiting for the rivers of gold to start to flow,” Stephenson recounted to Mi3. “Of course, that didn't happen. At that point, and obviously we did a lot of market research prior to launching that product, what I learned through that process is that whilst it might have been true for a few companies, the vast majority were just buying ads – there wasn't much targeting going on. When they were buying [ad] inventory for that particular purpose, we were the third option irrespective of how good our data was – and even at that point in time our data proposition was incredible.”

Nine and Adobe subsequently busted up then made-up and last week the broadcaster unveiled its 'all-new' customer data platform, or CDP, which it claimed will let advertisers and Nine segment, suppress and target 22 million Nine users faster, deeper, better across its portfolio in digital video, publishing and audio.

“Our integrated audience platform is really how we are starting to think about Nine as a collective,” said Chief Data Officer Suzie Cardwell. “We obviously have a fantastic range of really strong brands that our consumers love, but the real advantage for advertisers and us is that we've got a massively scaled audience who go to those multiple brands. And when we can join that up, we can target them in all of the different places that we find them. So we don't just target them online or via the Sydney Morning Herald – we can do that in a single campaign across all of those platforms. That’s what this joined up view has really allowed us to do.” About 60 per cent of Sydney Morning Herald users are also active on 9Now, Cardwell said, expanding the options and contextual environments in which they can be found.

Clean user data was another line Cardwell and digital advertising boss Nick young said would become a differentiator for Nine. 

The former US Chief Privacy Officer at media agency UM, Arielle Garcia, recently exploded the accuracy and usefulness of buying specific consumer segments to refine online ad campaigns. After requesting her profile data form a programmatic platform, Garcia discovered she was in hundreds of different segments with jobs that ranged from space to food service; she was multi-ethnic and married and single all at once.

But Cardwell said a single platform with robust and accurate user data was a major differentiator for Nine – i.e. it's not peddling duff data, and nor is it incentivised to do so.

“Our data is recent, it's relevant and we're transparent about where it where it comes from,” she said. “A lot of the adtech platforms who are still continuing to use third party-based cookie data – they are not transparent about it at all.”

Cardwell said there was “definitely an increased understanding amongst marketers about the challenges” in quality user data.

“I guess there are existing partnerships, and there are existing ways that agencies use DMPs, DSPs and adtech platforms – changing some of the behaviour there is probably more challenging. But we want marketers to understand media owners, like Nine, have a direct connection to the customer," she said.

"We have somewhere in the region of 18 million consumers coming to our digital properties every single month, and when they come to those properties, we understand who they are, and we collect information about what they do on the network, and we build a profile about them," added Cardwell, who spent years building out News Corp's first party data capability before switching to Nine.

"That connection to the customer simply doesn't exist with third party cookies and these black box ad tech platforms. They they do not have an ability to create this persistent view of the consumer that builds up a very deep and accurate understanding of what they're interested in, and in many cases, what they might be intending to do.”

Tribe quest

Nick Young said market demand for more granular user segments and data feeds is on the rise – upwards of 50 per cent of campaigns on 9Now used the 100-plus consumer “Tribes” segments offered by the media group. That along with the rapid increase in data matching briefs is now happening because, unlike four years ago, many companies have now deployed their own CDPs. “The market is just more sophisticated today,” Young said.  

"The fuel that really drives that CDP is our 22 million signed-in users and the activation of those at speed,” he said. “The key and secret to our success around insights, targeting and driving better business results is all about the speed in which we can identify those audiences, activate them and attach data sources to them. And the CDP is the driver of that and has significantly quickened up the process."

Young said the past 18 months had seen “demand for trialling or using these types of customer match capabilities increase significantly. That has a lot to do with companies getting their data and consent management in order.”