Fairfax, News and Nine join forces to launch digital identity co-op

Fairfax Media, News Corp and Nine have joined forces on a new digital identity co-operative aimed at making people-based marketing a reality across their media properties.

The trio have signed an industry-first memorandum of understanding to explore an Australian anonymised digital identity exchange that will combine their respective identity assets and allow advertisers to target authenticated audiences across all three publishing groups. In total, the three boast of an audience reach of 15 million Australians.

The new co-operative will first undergo a planning and consultation stage before launching in the first half of 2018. The intention is to bring addressable marketing to advertisers across all digital media properties, a move that comes as authenticated digital goliaths such as Facebook and Google take further digital advertising revenue away from traditional media houses.

For News Corp chief digital officer, Nicole Sheffield, collaboration between publishers that moves targeting away from cookies and targeting identities is a no-brainer.

“As Australian content creators, it’s incumbent on us more than ever to ensure our audiences, data, content and now identity are being properly harnessed for marketers by Australians,” she said.

Nine chief sales officer, Michael Stephenson, said the co-operative will allow Fairfax, Nine and News to deliver addressable advertising with greater scale in brand-safe environments.

“This combination of Australian publishers will offer a real alternative to the global players for our advertisers and agency partners,” he said.

Fairfax Media managing director of Australian metro publisher, Chris Janz, also saw the initiative streamlining the way marketers leverage quality data from content publishers to maximise results from advertising.

The news comes just a day after News Corp revealed a new data sharing partnership with realestate.com.au, aimed at augmenting its own audience data sets with insights from the property site’s 6 million users.

Fairfax, meanwhile, is looking to lift its programmatic and digital targeting game by striking a partnership with Google this week to service and support its next-generating digital audience efforts.

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