For News Corp Australia, it’s all about digital given that’s where advertisers and audiences are increasingly found. And with digital comes data.

With a flotilla of premium content sites such as News.com.au, The Australian, The Daily Telegraph, Taste.com.au, Vogue, News Corp sees a combined unique audience of 12 million Australians every month. This audience generates more than two billion data points each month and collecting and collating a detailed view of this audience’s interests and intent is News Connect.

News Connect is a data platform that allows advertisers to plan, data match and buy targeted media, all through an easy to use dashboard that gives advertisers access to more than 2,000 customer segments that can target campaigns like no other.

In partnership with ThinkPremiumDigital, B&T is exploring how premium content — which is 216 per cent more likely to generate click-through than run of the internet, according to research by Newsworks in the UK — drives better business results for advertisers.

Explaining News Connect, News Corp’s Suzie Cardwell, GM of data and ad product, tells B&T that the platform aggregates behavioural data from visitors to News’ sites and combines it with selected partner data including transaction and location to build a broad and deep view of News Corp’s audiences.

Says Cardwell: “We catch the behavioural data of anyone who comes to the site across our network. Take News.com.au as an example. It alone has 10 million unique users come through every month. We’re capturing the content consumption signals of that audience – the sections they visit, content they read and the type of content such as video.

“We know how much time they’re spending with us, how often they’ve visited, the times of day. And we do that in a privacy-compliant way. This allows us to build up a very broad view of what our audiences’ interests are and, in many cases, their intent.”

By way of example, Cardwell cites a recent campaign for a new home builder.

She says: “Using a combination of our data sources, we were able to find groups of people who’d visited the News’ network who’d also been to a new home showroom in the last couple of months.

“We grouped those people and targeted them with the home builder campaign. We were able to show that those who’d seen the campaign on News sites were 1.5 times more likely to have visited the showroom.”

Sounds awesome, right? But wait. There’s more. All this can be done through the self-serve booking capability of News Connect.

Cardwell says: “We’re bringing data to life for our customers. With News Connect they can see it, feel it and touch it. News Connect helps advertisers to plan better and execute campaigns with greater efficiency.”

Still, News isn’t resting on its digital and data laurels. News Connect continues to evolve at pace with the next stage of investment offering clients new levels of capability and quality segments, all designed to dramatically improve marketing effectiveness and deliver high impact digital campaigns with accuracy.

Of course, the driving force behind all this is professionally produced premium content that users actively seek out and engage with, over, say, a flash ad on a social media post.

Cardwell adds: “The attention our premium content attracts translates to much higher levels of recall which drives other outcomes like visits and locations.

“The combination of the environment and the content leads to a high level of quality engagement. When advertisers marry that with the targeting capabilities we’ve built, it’s a really powerful way to drive marketing outcomes.”