How the Guardian is set to leverage broader audience insights

With digital publishing becoming more globally competitive than ever before, media outlets are looking toward more innovative data management platforms to better understand their audience data and grow its readership base.

Recently, the Guardian Australia announced it partnered with data management platform Krux to work in several international markets, to manage and protects its audience data, as well as creating highly valuable audience segments for its advertisers. Working with Krux globally, the Guardian is set to have the capability to discover new audiences and revenue streams while activating and protecting current, valuable audience data.

The Guardian Australia’ head of commercial optimisation, Phil Eligio, told CMO that having a visual understanding of its audience across the digital landscape really helps the publisher to bring that understanding to life for advertisers and marketers.

“And not only on a campaign by campaign basis, but also through those immersive experience that we’ve built with our partnerships,” he added. “Having a really strong data management platform that sits behind that and supports that process is something that is very important for us.”

The partnership will also see Krux working closely with the Guardian to activate the publisher’s audience potential, helping with audience discovery and data management. Krux will be able to monitor advertisers and associated companies allowing these segments to then be purchased programmatically, providing the Guardian with an additional revenue stream.

According to Eligio, the partnership is integral to remaining competitive and Krux offers an effective platform that enables the publisher to explore those opportunities.

“Working with Krux gives us the opportunity to enrich our understanding and then apply it to our advertising activity,” he said. “A global partnership allows us to define audience understanding and not only how what we do here in Australia but on a global scale.”

Krux Australia and New Zealand country manager, Jo Gaines, explained that at its core, the platform allows its customers, like the Guardian Australia, to organise and manage their first party assets, and then to activate that data.

“So it essentially creates customer or audience segments for targeting with marketing or publishers to offer better targeting to their customers – and there a lot of things you can do within that,” she explained. “You can look at overlap opportunities and reach opportunities. There are a lot of capabilities in the platform to analyse data and look for opportunities to find more people who look like your customers - in a very short snapshot.”

Krux is set to continually help the Guardian globally to help improve its knowledge of its audience and audience targeting, extending the Guardian’s reach to view different geographic locations and other markets,

“One of the key things we’re talking about is the ability to share data in a really safe and secure way,” she said. “So brands can actually come to publishers like the Guardian and say I know what my target audience is and I know what my customers are like, how can we start to share knowledge about our audience and customers, to find more of them – who look like them and act like them.

“Then we can have a much more intelligent conversation about marketing and people-based marketing. It is not just about page impressions and views, but about how we can actually share insights to find real people, across different devices.”

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