New data platform Unpacked by Flybuys launches

Flybuys has today launched its new data platform, Unpacked by Flybuys, providing data, insights and measurement into their audiences geared towards marketers. The new data offering has been rebuilt from its previously Flybuys Digital Audiences offering.

The name Unpacked by Flybuys signals its mission to help agencies and brands unpack their marketing objectives and media spend to achieve better results, based on insights derived from the shopping baskets of 8.6 million active Flybuys members.

Flybuys chief product officer, Harley Giles, told CMO the data platform has been redesigned to match the three phases that marketing chiefs work around when designing a campaign. “We’ve looked to map our product portfolio to these three phases,” he said.

“The first phase is insights. ‘Help me understand who my audience is.’ The second is ‘show me where I can target those potential users online through a variety of different channels’. The third is ‘help me understand how successful that campaign has been’.”

Giles said it was a deliberate decision to structure the new data offering to ensure it met industry needs and around the insights needed at each part of the process. “We set up our product around those three key aspects of a digital marketing campaign flow,” he said.

After significant investment in its data division along with the appointment of a new sales director and several new hires across technology, product, partnerships and marketing, Unpacked by Flybuys has expanded its offering for media agencies and marketing managers. Its capability now offers customer insights and measurement of both Flybuys-activated and externally run digital advertising campaigns. 

Giles explained the team had a lot of conversations with the marketplace and its own internal experience showed the best way to structure the new platform.

“We could see that there were needs in the marketplace for people who were conducting each of those three phases. Being able to have a single source that can provide those three aspects of the campaign is really important. And that's why we structured our portfolio in that way,” he told CMO.

As a 25-year-old program, Giles said Flybuys has an enormous amount of data at its disposal that is highly valuable to marketers in being able to package it in particular ways. Looking at the pain points of legacy providers, the business wants to be a one-stop destination for data insights.

“By having flexibility and allowing for customisation within the context of those three key offerings, having a competitive cost to combine these services, is how we can position in the marketplace,” he said.

As part of this new proposition, Flybuys has recently partnered with local media and publishers, including News Corp Australia, TEG Analytics and Nine, to enhance the access marketers have to first-party data.

“We’re really pleased to get the three largest publishers, and broadcasters in this marketplace on board for the digital offering,” Giles said. 

The News Corp partnership will enable Flybuys data insights across News Corp's digital marketing platform, News Connect. The TV partnership will enable segment activation and measurement across their respective content networks. The TEG partnership will enable FMCG brands to measure the sales uplift from sponsoring and advertising within live sport and entertainment. This partnership, in particular, is a world-first, according to Giles.

“It’ll be known as FT Insights and Segments and it’s the first analytics tool that combines shopper data with sport and entertainment attendance,” he said. “It allows FMCG brands to drive and measure product sales and uplift by targeting people who attend sports and live entertainment events, both online and offline."

Giles said it’s so valuable because it helps marketers to understand the return of investment from the many millions of dollars spent on those events. “It can show the direct impact from the sponsorships and the advertising that occurs within those events, and how that translates into offline and online sales,” he said.

The platform is designed to provide media performance visibility all the way through from campaign to sales uplift with the ability to test and learn, and should eliminate wasted media. Giles said it’s also about providing a clean, reliable dataset. Seeing the changes coming in relation to third-party cookies, he claimed platforms like this one will be appealing to marketers because data is collected in a privacy compliant, first-party relationship.

“We’re conscious of the changes that are coming with regards to third-party cookies,” Giles said.

“It puts us in a good place to offer brand safe data collection and to be a trustworthy and reputable supplier of insights and activation services."

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