Southern Cross Austero aims for single customer view with Salesforce

Southern Cross Austereo (SCA) is partnering up with Salesforce to unify its customer data sets and build out a single view of its audiences.

The radio network giant is rolling out Salesforce’s Customer Data Platform (CDP) offering, a move it says will allow it to serve personalised content and advertising solutions to SCA audiences across its Listnr digital audio platform. The company boasts of more than 10 million users of its Listnr platform, which was launched last year and encompasses all of SCA’s digital audio offerings.

SCA said the technology would also future-proof it against reliance on third-party cookies while helping unlock first-party data across its signed in Listnr audience.

“Salesforce introduces to SCA a CDP that will work seamlessly with our already significant investment in new technology, introducing new, market-leading capabilities for all our teams at SCA,” SCA chief technology officer, Stephen Haddad, said.  

The tech investment is just one of several made by SCA. Last month, it confirmed a deal with contextual intelligence platform, NumberEight, to bring its live mobile context, Mobex, and behavioural audience targeting capabilities to its digital audio platform.

“Complementing our investment in AI companies Sourse AI, Sonnant, NumberEight and Frequency, Salesforce, and its suite of products, including Interaction Studio, will ensure our technology ‘backbone’ is the most advanced in our category,” Haddad continued. “New automated, powerful customer journeys that will improve our onboarding, conversion and engagement rates across all channels and devices is just one benefit we are excited to deliver to our content, sales and marketing teams.”

SCA already uses Salesforce primarily as a client data management tool as well as Salesforce CRM. However, marketing has employed a mix of individual, third-party off-the-shelf platforms to date. Introducing Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Journey Builder gives the team end-to-end customer interaction connectivity, while Interaction Studio will build on AI recommendations designed with Sourse AI in order to leverage cross-channel personalisation, SCA CMO, Nikki Clarkson, told CMO.  

She also revealed Salesforce Datorama was chosen as the intelligence platform to provide more sophisticated customer reporting and analytics.

“Leveraging a single customer view and the ability to remain on brand and on message across all our owned and operated products and off network, means we can deliver an even more unified marketing experience for all new and existing listeners,” Clarkson commented.

“With increased marketing attribution using real-time data ingestion and segmentation, we can now track audience acquisition, engagement and retention, increasing the effectiveness of our growth campaigns. Monitoring with greater insights what marketing efforts are working and what’s not will now also give us the ability to return maximum ROI in all our endeavours to grow the Listnr Audience Network.”

SCA chief sales officer, Brian Gallagher, said unlocking the Listnr audience network at scale with a true, single customer view will change the way SCA does business.

“Partnering with our clients to ensure we deliver solutions that will guarantee growth for them is now even more possible,” he said. “We know our clients rely on audio all the way through the marketing funnel for both mass and highly targeted and attributable solutions, and this capability will ensure each user receives the content they love with real-time segmentation across our audio channels. We are looking forward to working with our clients to deliver deeply informed and even more effective solutions.”

SCA also noted adopting this technology would ensure it’s in line with the other media players across the market. The rollout of Salesforce CDP and extended suite of Salesforce products is expected to be finalised by the first half of 2022.

Several broadcasting media outlets have been investing heavily in customer data management and audience-based advertising solutions that harness first and second-party data and reduce reliance on cookies for targeting.

These include Seven West Media and its 7RediQ audience insights and activation offering; Nine and its Audience Match solution using Adobe’s platform; and Network 10’s partnerships with Tealium and Lotame.

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