When Pippa Leary, News Corp Australia’s managing director of client product, tells Mediaweek about the context for D_Coded 2024, she laughs. “We know in digital, there’s a tonne of people selling snake oil.”
“What we try and do with D_Coded is hit on a theme each year, which really zeroes in on the key marketing challenges our clients are facing,” she explains. “At D_Coded, we try and bring solutions to those marketing challenges.”
This year, the biggest challenges the team identified are centred around signal loss, with two overarching changes coming – Leary calls them “the two horsemen on the horizon.”
“The first horseman is the end of third-party cookies in Chrome – it really matters in Chrome because they’re 60% of the market. So the day they turn it off, everything changes.
“Number two is privacy regulations. We now know that they’re going to table them in parliament in the August setting, so the starting gun has sounded. Whether we like it or not, data-driven marketing as we know it in Australia has to change, you’re simply not going to be able to do what you used to do.”
If marketers realise one thing after leaving D_Coded 2024, Leary hopes it’s that signal loss “is coming and it’s inevitable.”
“As a marketer, if I want to survive in the new world, I have to start thinking seriously about the data partnerships that I’m going to set up. And I need to give myself enough time to test before the cookie apocalypse actually takes place.”
The evolution of shoppable video
For those who have attended multiple D_Coded events, the evolution of previous announcements will be clear to see. Previous shoppable video innovations have evolved to Shoppable ScrollX and enhancements to Targeted Time in View, with Pippa Leary saying, “we’ve had shoppable video, but we’ve never had it in a mobile ad format.”
For example, shoppers reading one of News Corp’s Met Gala stories could see a ScrollX come through for Mecca, with lipstick in a trending shade. The shoppable ScrollX allows them to buy that within the ad format, without leaving the content and without leaving News Corp’s site to navigate to the retailer’s site.
“We love the ScrollX. 70% of our audience now accesses us on mobiles, and when you’re on that mobile site, and that ScrollX comes up, we will be the first people in the world who actually turn ScrollX shoppable.”
It’s a similar story with the launch of in-article News Shorts and a new agreement with LiveRamp’s Safe Haven.
News Shorts are mobile-first vertical videos, and the expansion of Shorts into in-article placements means vertical video ads will find even more audiences directly within the articles they’re reading.
“Once upon a time, we would be running our News Shorts and recording maybe 500 million vertical video views on our site, but maybe three and a half billion off-platform, because they’re really popular off-platform,” Leary says.
“Now with Safe Haven, we can actually track our audiences who are looking at our content off-platform really accurately, which puts us in a completely different position.”
Bringing AI to Intent Connect
AI is a hot-button topic, and D_Coded saw the announcement that Intent Connect – the platform unveiled at last year’s event – would be boosted using artificial intelligence technologies.
“As a platform for agencies and clients to use, it was getting pretty clunky. So the team has spent the last six months doing a total revamp on it, and what they’ve done is they’ve made a very slick user interface,” Leary explains.
One of the most obvious improvements to the platform is the creation of an AI chatbot, called CAI – or Connect AI.
Leary says CAI means clients can head to the chatbot and say “I’m looking to build a target audience of grocery buyers in the market for midsize SUVs”, and CAI will do it.
“You don’t need to be able to do all the kinds of complex searching that once upon a time you had to be able to do, so it’s really widening the scope for who can use Intent Connect – not only within our own business, but for all of our partner businesses who use it.”
See also: Lou Barrett: D_Coded all about creating better outcomes for News Australia clients
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Top Image: Pippa Leary