On Monday, News Corp Australia unveiled a series of new innovations at its annual D_Coded event, held in Sydney’s Entertainment Quarter.
This was the company’s fifth digital marketing event for advertising, marketing, and media executives, with announcements covering new partnerships, new ways for people to buy, and a new total commerce offering.
Mediaweek spoke to News Corp’s Managing Director, Client Product, Pippa Leary, to dig deeper into the Total Commerce offering announced at the 2023 D_Coded event.
See Also: D_Coded 2023: Every announcement from News Corp
See Also: Content and commerce: Lou Barrett on the nuts and bolts of D_Coded 2023
“We always had a really strong e-commerce business,” says Leary. “Today, we are the number one referrer for the online retail industry – we can see that especially in Black Friday and the cyber weekend. We’re sending $26 million worth of clicks out over that weekend. That was always there, but it was never really spoken about.”
Whilst a lot of announcements at D_Coded 2023 are built on last year’s shoppable video announcement, Leary points out that News Corp has been working to get their offering to where it is now for a long time.
“When we started doing shoppable video, we realised that we were in this amazing position where we can bring the top of the funnel and the bottom of the funnel together. What brings it together for us is this headless commerce capability, and extending headless commerce from just video into articles and images. If you look at our desktop business, most of it is text and images, it’s not just a video business. Actually bringing headless commerce into those content formats is incredibly important for us in terms of scale.
“It does look like we’ve all done it off the back of shoppable video, but these businesses were growing in parallel. What we’ve done with Total Commerce is we’ve linked them.”
News Corp’s Total Commerce offering
Announced fully at D_Coded 2023, News Corp’s Total Commerce offering is powered by technology co-developed with partner Vudoo. It means that consumers can buy a product simply by clicking on a video, text, or images, before continuing on their content journey.
For retailers, the tech means that they keep full control over the relationship with their customers, and are in control of details including pricing, stock control, delivery and fulfilment, payments, and personal details through their chosen e-commerce stack.
“The reason we’re calling it total commerce is that we think we are really uniquely positioned to partner with our clients to say that we’ve got solutions for you that will create outcomes that we can measure, from the very top of the funnel – we’ve always been good up there – the whole way through to the bottom of the funnel,” says Leary.
“We’ve been working on a pretty unique set of tools – there are so many tools, that we came up with the idea of calling it Total Commerce solutions.”
One of these tools is Intent Connect. Previously known as News Connect, the new platform focuses on identifying consumer intent. It brings marketers audience insights, content, media targeting, measurement, and attribution capabilities all in one place.
“That name change of our end-to-end insights platform from News Connect to Intent Connect is a small name change, but it is really meaningful. What you’re seeing us do is say that audience Insights are really important, but you can be completely overwhelmed by all the data. What we’ve done is we’ve focused down on the data that we think matters to you, and that is future intent.
“If a client comes to us – let’s say they’re Mecca and they’re selling lipstick – we can put our hand on a heart and say to them ‘next week, 800,000 women are going to visit news.com.au and they have the intent to buy lipstick’. That’s quite different than saying, ‘two weeks ago, we know this many people have accessed content that has lipstick in it’. It’s a subtle, but really important shift for us.”
D_Coded 2023: Lou Barrett, Paul Blackburn, and Pippa Leary.
Once a potential customer has hit the point of inspiration, it’s all about working to convert that into a sale. Previously, News Corp’s affiliate business would involve links that sent people off network to transact. Leary says that the new version of the affiliate business has resulted in less friction by keeping people on the network, but also comes with some brand new features for clients to play with.
“We’ve just finished testing this really neat piece of technology which we call affiliate automation, where we’re able to ingest our clients’ product catalogues live in real time – their entire catalogue. As they’re updating their catalogues, we’re getting those live updates.
“We’ve then got AI that ingests all those product catalogues, scans all the content on our site that’s live, and makes a link between an article that’s talking about fitness regimes with dumbbells and the fact that one of our clients has a range of dumbbells. We’ll be able to surface those dumbbells as widgets, and we put them around the articles. We’ve never been able to do that before, and that just means we can scale the way that we’re integrating and becoming what we call a shopfront.”
It’s one thing to talk the talk, but Leary says that when it comes to the Total Commerce offering, News Corp is also committed to walking to walk.
“It’s really easy to talk about the fact that we are now focused on client outcomes, but we have to be able to prove it. That’s why we spend a lot of time talking about our omnichannel attribution suite from Kantar which shows who’s actually buying, and will also pick up footfall.
“This is something that really gets forgotten. In our work with Moet for example, there was amazing brand uplift, it had amazing sell-through, they sold 16,000 bottles off the back of the campaign, etc. Interestingly, we also track footfall. These were not the people who bought the most personalised bottles online, but it was the people who went into Dan Murphy’s and Vintage Sellers as a result of seeing the ad. That’s gold. There was a 37% increase as a result of seeing that. We’re really trying to be able to have tools for clients who want results everywhere along that purchase journey.”
In a D_Coded event full of positives for brands and clients of News Corp, Leary says there is one solid message she hopes people take away from this year’s presentation.
“There are very few clients that will come into us and say, ‘I want a top to bottom of the funnel solution, I just want you guys to do at all’. We do come across those, but most of them have a specific need at a specific part of the funnel.
“The message we want to get across is to just reach out to us – we don’t mind where we work, but we think we’ve really got a valuable part to play everywhere along that purchase funnel.”
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Top Image: Pippa Leary