Bauer Media is aiming to create a single view of its customers, as the publisher also eyes off new digital content offerings and partnerships. It is also set to announce a partnership with a publishing private programmatic marketplace (PMP) in order to offer advertisers more access to its digital inventory.
The publisher launched the local version of its global digital offering, Bauer Xcel, a year ago. Bauer Xcel provides its advertisers with innovative digital strategies and was rolled out at time when the business was looking to boost its digital capabilties to make the most of its digital assets, which it took back control over from Mi9.
Bauer Xcel's Australian managing director, Carl Hammerschmidt, told AdNews that one of its strategic focuses moving into year two now involves understanding its audience both on and offline, to both improve user experience but also offer "unprecedented knowledge" of its audience to commercial partners.
“We've got about a million records from all of our different customer touch-points across Bauer,” Hammerschmidt says. “We're building a single customer view (SCV) of that database and we're working on matching those offline customer records with online behaviour, and at the moment we've got about a quarter of a million matches.”
Hammerschmidt explained that the business is aiming to grow the number of matches to one million over the next year, to ensure the publisher has a “true record” of offline demographic information that can be mapped with online behavioural information.
“When you think about what Bauer is as a business, in the last two and a half years since we got our digital rights back we've really evolved to being a true multi-platform, multi-media business,” he says.
“We're cross device, cross platform, we're events, we're print, we're digital, we're mobile and we're building the capability to recognise our customers across all those touch points.”
The publisher is also set to announce a partnership with a publishing private programmatic marketplace (PMP) in order to offer advertisers more access to its digital inventory.
“The last 12 months have been about getting to market, making sure our inventory is priced right, selling the way we should be yielding and we're currently at looking with partnering with the PMP consortiums,” he says.
One current international PMP in the marketplace is The Guardian's Pangaea Alliance, which includes inventory from premium publishers such as: CNN International, the Financial Times, The Economist and Reuters.
Hammerschmidt told AdNews that Bauer's digital revenues at the moment are sitting at around 15-20% of its print revenues, with the plan being to scale that “significantly” over the next few years.
This would be something that could be assumed would be top propriety of the newly appointed CEO of the publisher, Nick Chan.
Chan was named CEO of Bauer last week, after a five month search for a replacement after former CEO David Goodchild stepped down from the role.
Chan was formerly COO for Seven West Media and his appointment has been received positively with many commenting that he seems to be a safe choice for the business, after his named was being thrown around for many months as a potential CEO for the publisher.
More to love
One of Bauer's big digital projects to date has been its 'To Love' network, featuring content under the verticals of food and home.
Hammerschmidt says that there are more areas for the 'To Love' network to expand to, hinting that health and parenting offerings are coming down the pipeline.
“We're looking at opportunities in parenting and the moment we've got a strong parenting offering in the Women's Weekly, the content from Mother and Baby, but we're also looking at some partnerships and some new offerings in the parenting space later this year as well.” he says.
“We're also looking how we can expand on our health and lifestyle content and that runs out across a range of different products,” Hammerschmidt added.
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