News Corp Australia's D_Coded announces innovations in consumer targeting

Customer Match is one of two major innovations News Corp Australia has unveiled at D_Coded, allowing advertisers to target brand messages to individual customers anonymously, whether or not they are logged in.

In a complementary announcement the company also revealed a new Customer Data Platform, which will be among Australia’s biggest, providing advertisers with unprecedented, privacy-safe insights from across News Corp Australia, including Foxtel Group and REA Group.

Customer Match, developed in partnership with location data specialist Near, is a new identity database, offering client partners the ability to match their customer emails against 16 million Australian emails. It can then target brand messages to individual customers in a privacy-safe way.

Customer Match is designed to deliver scaled, person-based targeting of audiences in News Corp Australia’s digital environments, helping brands both find new customers and target existing ones.

Managing director, client product Pippa Leary (pictured), said the Customer Match capability will deliver client partners with unprecedented insights into Australian consumers.

“Customer Match allows marketers to activate audiences with genuine scale to generate genuine outcomes,” Leary said.

“Near has built a database of 16 million Australian emails and through our partnership we have matched these to the IDs we have sitting in our market-leading audience intelligence platform, News Connect.

“Using News Connect IDs means audience members are not required to be registered and logged in while a campaign is running.

“Customer Match is a genuine game changer promising to turbo charge the match rates between client customers and our audience.

“Importantly we can also measure the effect we've driven through our Attribution Suite - brand uplift, footfall, FMCG sales, and other category sales.

“This is all done in a privacy-compliant way where customer data is always completely anonymised, which will be unaffected by the cookie apocalypse.”

L-R: Mark Brownie, Head of Trading Data ＆ Programmatic Sales
Pippa Leary, Managing Director, Client Product
Lou Barrett, Managing Director, National Sales
Suzie Cardwell, General Manager, Client Product & Strategy
Michael Krawczyk, Head of Digital Client Growth & Capability

Customer Match has been built to drive customer outcomes and is immediately available.

General manager of client product and strategy Suzie Cardwell said the market understands that the major challenge of matching email addresses on digital networks is getting sufficient match rates and then finding active daily or weekly logged in users to achieve scale.

“Our Customer Match solution addresses both of these critical challenges,” said Cardwell.

“In our trials run to date, we’re seeing high match rates. As our targeting solution doesn’t rely on people being logged in to receive advertising, our active user rates are extremely high.”

News Corp Australia also announced a new Customer Data Platform (CDP), one of the largest in Australia.

In partnership with Foxtel Group, Streamotion, and REA Group, News Corp Australia will launch a new CDP in July 2022, combining the force of the networks’ first party data to build the richest targeting capability in the market for advertising clients.

“It is with great excitement that we announce our new CDP, it will supercharge our understanding of audiences, uncovering their interests not only across News Corp Australia’s digital network but across all of the networks,” said Leary.

“Done with privacy at the forefront, we anonymise the emails and deal only in ID numbers rather than personal information.

“Our new CDP will advance our understanding of our audiences’ interests while continuing to deliver our advertisers privacy-compliant ways to talk to audiences and customers.

“It will give us deep, granular audience intelligence and targeting capability and we will be able to extract meaningful insights in order to create our customer segmentation, the kind of segmentation that allows us to target client messages to the right people.”

News Corp Australia announced Customer Match and the new Customer Data Platform at D_Coded, the company’s fourth digital marketing event for advertising, marketing, and media executives.