Nine debuts audience matching offering; signs up Coles as launch partner

Nine has taken the wrappers off Audience Match, a new service giving brands the ability to activate people-based audiences across its media properties.

The media giant is basing its new purpose-built solution on Adobe’s Data Management Platform (DMP) offering, Audience Manager, and has signed on Coles as its exclusive launch partner. The idea is to allow marketers to use their first-party customer data to match with Nine’s 13 million registered users in order to better target advertising through its digitally enabled media properties.

Nine said the new offering will allow marketers to move from targeting devices to communicating with known customers in an automated way that meets privacy requirements. Users can build look-a-like audiences and use online and offline data sources as part of segmentation efforts, with matching based on hashed email addresses.

It’s also a step forward in reducing reliance on cookie-based targeting, which is on its way out after Google announced plans last year to make cookies obsolete in its Chrome browser by 2021. It’s part of a wider push for more user-controlled privacy protections, spurred on by EU requirements like GDPR and California’s CCPA.

Read more: As the cookie crumbles, what comes next for digital advertisers?

“Audience Match will help facilitate people-based marketing across Nine, leveraging our signed-in audience of 13m Australians and seamlessly bring together the power of premium content and people-based data to create personalised customer experiences,” said Nine chief sales officer, Michael Stephenson. 

“This partnership gives Australian marketers a unique alternative to both traditional media players and new digital platforms in terms of bringing a quality content environment together with data at scale.”

In a statement, Coles CMO, Lisa Ronson, said the new Nine capability will allow the supermarket giant to be more customer centric in its approach by targeting real people, rather than a device and provide its customers and viewers with personalised and relevant information and offers.

Under the partnership, Coles will upload hashed email addresses and customer datasets into Coles’ instance of Audience Manager and select Nine as a custom destination. This enables Coles to transfer their data for Nine to easily match, segment, buy and optimise every dollar spent across Nine’s properties.  

“Coles is undergoing a digital transformation to ensure we are providing our customers with the most seamless interactions with our brand. This partnership is so important to ensure we are making the most of all the communications we have,” Ronson said.

“We need to provide our customers with the most relevant and personalised information so they can make the most informed decisions about what they need and how they shop. We are thrilled to be the launch partner in this initiative because it will help our marketing team make the best decisions on where and how we should communicate.”

Nine is rolling out Audience Match now across its on-demand offering, 9Now, and the rest of its digital properties in the first half of 2021.

Nine’s latest investment comes just a week after rival, Seven West Media, struck a deal with LiveRamp to implement its cookie-less data solution, allowing the publisher to match authenticated user data with LiveRamp’s people-based identifier. Again, the name of the game is more personalised targeting while removing reliance on third-party cookies.

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