News Corp Australia today launched its annual showcase event, Come Together 2019, revealing 24 media and marketing initiatives across data, audio, video and commercial partnerships.

The event, held in a custom built airport lounge in Sydney, guided guests through five immersive customer journeys to showcase how News Corp engages more Australians and connects its clients with more of their customers.

The journeys highlighted innovation across key categories of food, sport, travel, prestige and local communities, each designed to demonstrate News Corp’s strengths as an innovative media and marketing services company.

The series of immersive journeys – titled Food is Life; Sportopia; Escapism; The Art of Influence; and Love Where They Live – featured content experiences created by News’ own digital content marketing agency, Suddenly.

Speaking at the first in a series of eight Come Together sessions this week, Michael Miller, executive chairman, said: “We are taking clients on a journey of exploration to show the new products we have created to deliver more effective campaign results.

“By combining the smarts of data and technology, with the creativity of our trusted content, we are showing clients how they can work with us and our engaged audiences, to deliver better outcomes for their brands”.

Damian Eales, chief operating officer, publishing, gave guests an outline of the initiatives as he described the value of understanding not only consumers’ needs and wants, but how to intersect with them on every layer of their customer journey.

He said: “Come Together is our biggest showcase yet.

“Our suite of initiatives, combined with the breadth and depth of our media and marketing capabilities demonstrate we are so much more than media.

Eales added: “We deliver a coherent and integrated ecosystem of assets and solutions that create trust, confidence and generates demand for brands”.

As part of the 24 initiatives, News Corp announced greater sales collaboration with MCN.

Lou Barrett, managing director national sales, said Newsamp, the company’s integrated client solutions capability, will now partner with MCN to trial the inclusion of Foxtel, FOX SPORTS and Sky News to deliver an all-of-business solution.

Barret said: “With dedicated specialists embedded in Newsamp’s offering, clients will now receive the most highly integrated and creative multimedia campaigns”.

A selection of major initiatives launched at Come Together 2019 include:

• UnrulyEQ+: A revolutionary new data-powered tool, offering unparalleled levels of consumer insights, which combines the depth of proprietary emotional data from video platform Unruly, and the breadth of audience targeting platform, News Connect.
• NewsCast: a portfolio of new podcast series’ each with commercial partnership opportunities. The podcasts will be devoted to sport, travel, food, fashion and true crime, produced, marketed and distributed by high profile talent drawn from News Corp’s diverse businesses.
• Code Block: In sport, for the first time, an opportunity to secure category exclusivity across News Corp Publishing for its coverage of a chosen sports code including AFL, NRL, cricket, motorsport and racing. Clients can block News Corp’s coverage of a season or one of the many big sporting events.
• Vogue VIP: As part of Vogue’s Diamond Year celebrations, it will launch a market-first membership program offering subscribers access to exclusive benefits, experiences, offers and content.
• News Connect: An expanded catalogue of News Connect customers, incorporating the key categories of food (Food Connect); travel (Escape Connect); sport (Fan Connect) and communities (Local Connect), and prestige (Prestige Connect).
• News Connect SelfServe: a new self-serve targeted digital booking capability for clients.
• The Escape Marketplace: A new product that will allow consumers to move from inspiration to transaction with travel products on escape.com.au.
• Escape-a-thon: An online travel sale in June 2019 – a massive three-day flash sale of exclusive travel deals, marketed across the entire News Corp network.
• Digital Kitchen: One supercharged digital platform with the most powerful digital food brands – Taste, Delicious, Best Recipes and Kidspot Kitchen – offering category exclusive partnerships and integration of consumer brands.
• Recipe Rebrand: The opportunity for clients to block out the competition by inserting their brands in up to 100,000 recipes across the entire Food network.
• Trusted By… a powerful new short-form video offering from Suddenly Productions which leverages the trust in News Corp’s brands to endorse clients’ brands.

In addition, two new strategic partnerships for News Connect were announced.

Skyscanner – one of the world’s largest travel search companies; and Near – one of the world’s most sophisticated geo-targeting companies, which together will enhance the quality of customer segmentation and targeting.