Report: Australia's love affair with audience data is heating up

Australian marketers are enamoured with audience data and ramped up their expenditure by 48 per cent over the past year, a new report has revealed.

Eyeota’s second Annual Index Report, which focuses on audience data expenditure globally, reported Australian brand spend was up nearly 50 per cent compared to the previous year, with campaigns using audience data increasing by 23 per cent over the same period.

According to the global results, audience data spend for video was one of the high-growth areas, doubling year-on-year thanks to rising spend in the US, UK and Australia. Mobile campaign spend also jumped 2.6 times in 12 months, propelled by retail and ICT companies increasing demand for demographic, location-based and ethnic group data segments.

Across the board, the most popular categories of data were household and parenting, sports and fitness, media and entertainment, finance, travel and leisure and electronics and computers.

The highest spending advertiser by vertical in the Asia-Pacific region was finance brands (up 1.8 times year-on-year), followed by automotive and ICT companies. Globally, the sectors leading expenditure were finance, electronics and computers, and retail. But there were plenty of others ramping up spend, including airlines (up 3x), food and beverage (3.6x) and film and TV channels (3.8x).

The report also found financial services groups doubled their investment into in-market travel and financial services customers over the last year, a wave of spending led by credit card and insurance companies. But it was ICT companies that experienced the strongest growth in the region (2x year-on-year), promoting a variety of mobile apps and telecom services targeted at location-based users and business professionals.

When it comes to audience types, the report found demand for millennials data grew by 100 per cent year-on-year, primarily pursued by travel agents, CPG/FMCG and beauty and personal care product brands. In total, lifestyle, age, gender and income segments represented more than 20 per cent of all audience data impressions in 2016.

In addition, intent data demand lifted 1.5 times year-on-year, while inferred, lookalike segments by 1.7 times over the same timeframe.

“Audience data is driving campaigns to new heights, and brands are finally realizing that it’s the key to successful consumer engagement,” Eyeota CEO, Kevin Tan, said. “The Eyeota annual Index report emphasises the importance of utilising audience data to improve ad and content relevancy.”

The report is based on combined internal data of more than 2400 brands covering 11,000 campaigns in 60 countries. Eyeota claims to have 3.5 billion unique profiles across APAC, EMEA and the Americas.

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