It’s not sexy but like AI, it’s going to affect your job – and your company. Another salvo in the fast approaching privacy regime set for tabling in parliament in August was fired last week by the ACCC around how personal information is collected and used by data firms – Experian, Nielsen, Publicis-owned Epsilon and Woolworths-owned Quantium were among those flagged by the competition regulator last week in its eighth interim report as part of the multi year Digital Platforms Inquiry. And to be blunt, any professional working in ecom, marketing, customer experience, digital advertising and data and analytics is going to have a rude shock for what they can do now versus what is likely in a year or perhaps a bit longer. But UNSW Business School’s Professor of Practice, Peter Leonard, says last week’s release by the ACCC of its Data Products and Services interim report makes “every firm in this economy a data firm.” And in the short-term, that’s not good news for most companies because their data readiness and maturity is not matched by the “fundamental change” which will force everyone to “rethink their understanding” of what even defines personal information” according to ADMA’s Director of Legal and Advocacy, Sarla Fernando.

Leonard and Fernando are joined by Capital Brief’s Legal and Regulatory Affairs Correspondent, Laurel Henning and Civic Data’s founder, Chris Brinkworth. And for a tantalising teaser, Future Media’s Ricky Sutton lays out the changes Google is making to its search engine which is already seeing organic referral traffic to publishers abroad drop 40 per cent – brands, he says, are facing similar declines.

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News Corp’s first party tech build is now at point where the publisher will match spend from customers using its new platform and run it in parallel with a standard cookie-based approach to prove it delivers much bigger reach and more sales.

Via a “privacy compliant” approach using its first party data and data matching via the likes of Google, LiveRamp, Adobe, InfoSum and AdFixus alongside its more commerce-focused websites, News can find buyers who are ready to buy specific products. Hence calling the new stack Intent Connect. Director of Commercial Data, Video & Product, Paul Blackburn, says one “large supermarket” – flip a coin – has increased spend “3,000 per cent” after trialling Intent Connect. GM of Digital Revenue, Mark Brownie, cites tests with “a major insurance company” that used News’ “self-learning, self-optimising segments” to boost acquisition by 199 per cent versus cookies. “We’re not talking about vanity media metrics, we’re talking about hard sales,” per Blackburn.

Plus, log-level attribution benchmarking, says National Head of Digital, Jess Gilby, “shows 197 per cent increase in reported reach, which is huge, and 10 per cent higher conversion rates - and we're just getting started”.

Those reach gains are because News’ can now measure across browsers that have already killed off cookies – basically the other half of the internet.

Meanwhile, offsite targeting is growing rapidly after News launched vertical video products – AKA shorts – basically the same formats as social media, which means buyers can use the same ads across both social and News’ sites to extend reach without having to do everything twice. Buyers are buying in.

“Our total video stream number is around the 4 billion mark – and 3 billion of those are happening outside of our owned and operated environments,” says Brownie.

Plus, it’s going hyper local – using the log-ins from 100 local mastheads to enable stores to “upload lists of their outlets and automatically generated audiences based on that data,“ says Brownie. “That's really powerful from a pure addressability standpoint, but it also tells a retailer a tonne of stuff about their existing or future customers in those areas, and the nuances between the different locations.”

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In most B2B businesses lead generation, or individual qualified "lead gen” more accurately, is at the core of business marketing - certainly for the tech sector. The merits of focusing on groups of buyers influential in a large corporate purchase over an individual executive is not new, but what is has a veteranB2B marketing analyst warning that almost every sector in B2B is still “focused on completely the wrong thing”. And the required shift that Kerry Cunningham, a former Forrester Principal Analyst now at US-based 6Sense, says is needed from B2B marketers has the backing of the Global VP and Head of Marketing at engineering giant ABB, Jo Woo, who agrees “traditional lead metrics are outdated”. B2B marketers must ditch their “obsession with counting leads”, she says, justas sales teams too must rethink their approach. For Andrew Haussegger, CEO at specialist B2B agency Green Hat, part of the fix is to “free the content”. That is, stop putting content behind a gate in order to capture leads – because brands need to influence a much broader set of people much earlier. Here’s the conversation that puts the hard data on lead generation.

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