Unique access to sociodemographic data will allow regional media to sell audiences at scale
London: Premium local news publisher co-operative 1XL, the UK’s second largest source of news audience, announces it has joined forces with marketing research and technology company AudienceProject to launch an audience transparency initiative. The announcement marks AudienceProject’s first partnership with a major UK publisher co-operative, following collaborations with the likes of Google and Coca Cola.
1XL, which represents 30 of the UK’s leading local news publishers – including Johnston Press, Newsquest and Archant and DC Thompson – in the national advertising market, offers advertisers access to over 800 of its local news brands across the UK and Ireland in one purchase.
The partnership with AudienceProject will equip 1XL’s advertising sales teams across direct and programmatic with AudienceProject’s core measurement and targeting tools to enrich impressions and verify that their inventory reaches the right audiences, providing agencies and ad buyers with unique insight into regional media audiences at scale.
Specifically, the partnership will provide 1XL with exclusive access to AudienceProject’s data ecosystem for unparalleled data targeting, as well as its award-winning measurement tool, AudienceReport, which is built on a proprietary technology stack and global panel of online users. At a campaign level, AudienceReport enables real time validation of key audience metrics like reach, uniques, demographic profiles, affinities and more in order to offer its clients complete transparency.
An integral part of AudienceProject’s ecosystem is that sociodemographic data points are shared with all publishers contributing to the ecosystem. This collaborative approach tackles a central challenge for premium news publishers who are wanting to sell audiences, as it allows them to do it at scale.
Jacob Lachmann, CEO of Audience Project said: “Measurement is not something that should happen two weeks after the campaign has ended. It needs to happen in real time so you can optimise while the campaign is still running and consider different approaches if necessary. The likes of Facebook and Google have set the bar high due to their reach and data capabilities. With our partnership, 1XL will be able to close the technical gap and use its local presence as a publisher to give a superior product to its clients.”
Scott Gill, Managing Director of 1XL, added: “Our partnership with AudienceProject will play an important role in enhancing the targeting capabilities of our direct sell and better empower our PMPs. We strive to deliver 100% transparency and to achieve this it is not enough to mark your own homework. We’re continually enforcing key principles of safety and visibility in online advertising through the likes of our recent Advertising Charter, and this partnership is yet another wake up call to advertisers and agencies that they should be moving spend to blue chip publisher environments, where they are guaranteed a transparent and endorsed system of inventory quality.”
Johan Boserup, Global CEO at GroupM Trading said: “In an industry moving more and more towards programmatic and automation, the demand for transparent and independent validation is ever growing. When you are in charge of one the biggest media buying budgets in the world, third party measurements are essential.”
About 1XL:
Formed by a UK media-first partnership between 30 of the UK’s longest established news publishers, 1XL is the UK’s largest source of premium digital news media audience and display inventory from 800 premium newsbrand sites. With a comScore unique total audience reach exceeding 22.7m (Total Audience January 2017), we can match the national unique coverage offered by the Portals through display media hosted exclusively on sought-out, unique-content filled and implicitly trusted branded news sites.
Collectively 1XL publishers employ over 5,000 full-time UK-based journalists covering every corner of the country and providing unparalleled levels of unique content (250,000 pieces of original content every month) versus ALL other UK news propositions. This keeps our users highly engaged and naturally coming back for more without reliance on SEO and other audience boosting tricks.
1XL’s DMP is not only powered by first party data from its 2.7m daily users but also uses valuable third party data drawn from 4.6b unique cookies. This allows them to build an audience from over 2200 different audience segments, guaranteeing optimised and efficiently delivered campaigns, whatever the objectives.
About AudienceProject:
AudienceProject helps brands, agencies, publishers and e-commerce companies identify, target and validate audiences. The company offers a variety of products designed to make the complex world of online audiences simpler and more effective. The products are based on a proprietary technology stack, algorithms and more than 1 million panelists worldwide.
