Media agency leaders, buyers and planners have welcomed News Corp’s focus on data security and how brands can navigate its ecosystem with confidence in a cookieless world.
Senior media buyers have given News Corp’s D-Coded presentation a tick of approval and feel more confident the business will support marketers from signal loss and the deprecation of cookies, which impairs how brands target and track audiences.
On Tuesday, News Corp senior executives, including Lou Barrett, Paul Blackburn and Pippa Leary unveiled a revamped Intent Connect platform that uses AI tech and partnerships with data tech firms like CDP LiveRamp, digital privacy vendor AdFixus and Google PAIR that enhances it data collaboration capabilities of planning, booking and measurement in News Corp’s ecosystem.
Media agency leaders were widely impressed by the content of the presentation and its importance at a time when third party cookie deprecation and privacy laws are on the minds of marketers.
OMD Australia co-CEO Sian Whitnall said that News Corp has taken a “leadership role when it comes to managing privacy and data on platform.
“News Corp is in a leadership position when it comes to connecting their ecosystem, supporting advertisers and marketers in being able to navigate a fragmented ecosystem.
What was great about D_Coded was their narrative. It was very easy to understand what is a very complex subject for marketers and advertisers to navigate,” she told B&T just after the event.
“There is less of a narrative around loss of cookies but there is a focus on their lack of ability to measure and understand business performance. Our clients are more focused on the outcome and impact versus third party cookie loss itself. What I liked about today’s presentation is that it felt like an easy way to navigate a conversation and it felt like there were tangible solutions that would support marketers.
She added that she would have like a bit more detail about what agencies can do to support the high match rates (in some cases 100 per cent) when using clients’ first party data.
Omnicom Media Group ANZ chief executive Peter Horgan told B&T he was impressed by the presentation.
“It was a strong and well-articulated proposition for how customers can engage across the news limited assets in the post cookie world. The challenge for the market has been that News Corp has previously been complex to do business with and this is a big step in the right direction. Everything is getting so much more complex that any rationalisation within individual platforms is welcome,” he said.
“Their superpower is their number of signed up users and it’s smart that they are leveraging that across their assets.”
Atomic 212 head of national trading Lorraine Woods said that it was “exciting to see NewsCorp pioneering the way in the signal-less world”.
She added: “The landscape is going through a complex transformation and is facing these challenges with data leakage and privacy risks. NewsCorp is providing a safe and easy environment to implement complex data solutions in an easy transactional ecosystem through their Intent Connect platform. And they have the ability to do this at scale being the one of the country’s biggest media suppliers with a large first and third party data suite.”
‘A great data-safe solution’
The announcement that really piqued her interest is News Corp integrating Google PAIR and LiveRamp ATS Direct into customer match, which enhances audience targeting capabilities and “provides a great first-party data safe solution for advertisers and their agencies”.
“The transformation of Intent Connect self service platform has made for a really efficient user friendly way for advertisers and agencies to access News Corps scalable digital media assets and audience targeting capabilities in a safe way while making transacting with them easy,” she said.
“I think they spoke about & provided solutions to the most relevant challenges the industry is facing. What would be amazing to see in the future is how advertising and agencies access this level of data and trade on this first party data autonomously across the open web.
A senior media planner at one of the country’s largest media agencies, who spoke to B&T anonymously, said D_Coded “genuinely addresses what is changing for digital”.
“Given they have the most scale in the country, they are an obvious media owner that should be addressing these issues. How that ladders up to what we are doing on a day to day basis with our clients is perhaps still to be worked out.
“By and large the biggest issue we are going to run into in this industry is the transportation of data, so the more secure they help clients feel about it, the better the opportunity for us to partner with them. That is what landed today, they have this ecosystem that has been set up to make sure that agencies and their clients are not liable for any potential litigation or falling foul of the ACCC or GDPR rules. The comfort in understanding that they can shepherd that data and help us activate it is huge.”
