News Corp powers into the ‘post-cookie’ world

News Corp Australia has announced groundbreaking initiatives to harness the company’s marketing powers and provide a world-first ‘unbroken’ online shopping experience.

News Corp Australia managing director, client product Pippa Leary, left, managing director of national sales Lou Barrett and Suzie Cardwell, general manager, client product and strategy, at the D_Coded event in Sydney on Tuesday.

News Corp Australia has announced a series of groundbreaking initiatives to harness the company’s significant marketing powers and provide a world-first “unbroken” online shopping experience for users.

The innovations were unveiled in Sydney on Tuesday at D_Coded, NCA’s fourth annual digital marketing event for advertising, marketing and media executives.

Set against the backdrop of the media company’s staunch commitment to maintaining the privacy of its subscribers, NCA — including the Foxtel Group and the REA Group — has developed “Customer Match” in conjunction with location data specialist Near.

Customer Match, an identity database, will offer client partners the ability to match their customers’ email addresses against the email addresses of the 16 million Australians who subscribe to products owned by News Corp (publisher of The Australian).

The anonymised information can then be used by advertisers and marketers to target brand messages to individual customers in a privacy-safe way.

Customer Match will be complemented by a new Customer Data Platform, to be launched in July.

“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,” said NCA’s managing director, client product, Pippa Leary.

“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.”

The involvement of REA and Foxtel will triple the company’s marketing reach overnight, Ms Leary said, and install NCA as a market leader in the realm.

“That is a huge deal for us — it means we have stepped into the addressable dogfight with a really strong dog,” she said.

Ms Leary said with Google planning to completely phase out third-party cookies from its web browser Chrome by the middle of next year, the initiatives being launched by NCA will be introduced at a critical time for the marketing and publishing industry.

A cookie is a small piece of text sent to browsers by websites, allowing brands to collect and use audience data for marketing purposes

“As we hurtle towards a post-cookie world, the only marketers and publishers and media companies that are going to survive are those with direct, permissioned connections with their audience and customer base,” Ms Leary said.

“The ‘cookie apocalypse’ is rolling towards everybody. Lazy digital marketing is going to get wiped out in one fell swoop.

“But through these initiatives, NCA has future-proofed itself from the apocalypse, and we won’t be affected.”

NCA subscribers will be identified on Customer Match only as “hash IDs”.

“We don’t know anyone’s names — we have no personally identifiable information whatsoever,” Ms Leary said.

At Tuesday’s event, NCA also unveiled Shoppable Video Advertising, a new approach to the way brands connect with consumers to allow purchases directly within advertisers’ video content.

The new product, among the first of its kind in the world, enables consumers an “unbroken” shopping experience — that is, they can now initiate and complete a purchase within video advertising on NCA sites, without leaving the video.

“Nowadays, when people are online, they don’t ‘go’ shopping — they’re ‘always’ shopping,” Ms Leary said.

“We’ve partnered with Vudoo to build new interactive video technology that presents the customer with the opportunity to ‘buy now’ while in the video. For the consumer it allows them to act immediately on the desire to buy without leaving their chosen content, resulting in a unique shoppable video experience.”