News Corp Australia last week held its third Decoded event – the second Decoded as a virtual event. But not everybody had to watch the messages for advertising, marketing and media executives online.
“Some people are a bit streamed out,” News Corp’s managing director of national sales Lou Barrett told Mediaweek shortly after the major presentation.
News Corp’s Lou Barrett
“What we did this year is offer both a virtual event and in-person contact. We did a series of events last year called The Frontiers where we took the key people from the agency groups up to the Hunter Valley for a couple of days and covered what we had been doing for the past 12 months. It was good to get people out of Sydney and to have them face-to-face.
“It was so successful that we decided instead of just making Decoded a streaming event, we would run lunches and dinners around it as well. In the few days after Decoded we will be having 21 events around the country.”
Hosting the streamed Decoded event for News Corp was Barrett who then introduced general manager of data and ad product Suzie Cardwell and general manager, digital revenue & marketing services Paul Blackburn to get into the detail of the messaging.
These executives later fan out across Australia to live events with Barrett looking mainly after Sydney, Blackburn going to Melbourne and Caldwell going to Brisbane.
“What we are trying to do with Decoded every time we run one is to showcase what we are doing from a digital perspective and to show we are offering the best outcomes,” explained Barrett.
Getting the audience to pay Attention
Barrett: “Everyone is talking about attention, and quality attention. That is where we have been focused. It’s not enough to just get attention, it has to be quality attention.”
The biggest announcement out of Decoded 3 was a number of new data partnerships.
“One of the really critical things for us is making sure that those data partnerships we have are all matched against our own first party data. That means we will be insulated against the demise of cookies with regard to our own network.”
The new data comes from the financial services, automotive and supermarket sectors.
Targeted Time in View
“We launched Targeted Time in View last September and it’s all about quality attention,” said Barrett. “We started off with about 20 segments and we have added to that and we are up to about 45 segments. It is about delivering engaging ad formats which is what people want.”
Barrett further explained: “Targeted Time in View has been very successful for us and people are loving using NewsConnect which goes from strength to strength. Two billion data points from across all our sites and we now have 15 key partners. With 2700 segments people are able to find any audience they want and particularly, they are able to find intenders which is very important.”
As part of recent News Corp digital audience growth, Barrett said: “We are seeing some great numbers in our digital print editions. It shows people love our printed product, and this enables them to engage with those products digitally.”
When asked about best-performing sectors in terms of revenue generation, Barrett said there had been good recovery across the board in most categories bar one. “It’s mostly travel that is not back yet. It’s definitely in recovery though. We have just had our most successful weeks in travel since we went into Covid. Businesses are starting to come back. Overall among our clients, the people who have been in the best shape are people with a digital element to their business.
“We just launched Travel + Luxury magazine and the first edition was sold out and audiences are wanting travel content. The upside for our clients and us though will be when international travel returns.”
See also: News Corp’s Decoded 3: New data capabilities and digital ad solutions