What You Need to Know

• Southern Cross Austereo (SCA) and Nova Entertainment both turned to Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) to strengthen audience engagement and ad targeting—but took very different approaches.

• SCA implemented Salesforce Data Cloud to unify its marketing and ad-serving, overcoming integration issues typical in such data projects to improve segmentation and ad ROI. It's achieved all of its original objectives and is now looking to new opportunities according to Cameron Strachan

• Nova opted for mParticle, focusing on first-party data activation. The strategy cut customer acquisition costs by up to 30% and improved listener engagement.

• SCA faced occasional pricing headaches, with data consumption models making it difficult to forecast costs. Nova's approach proved more cost-efficient, although it might have taken a more composable approach if it had its time again, says Tim Armstrong

• Key Takeaway: CDPs can deliver major business benefits, but understanding pricing models, integration challenges, and future scalability is crucial before diving in.

Two of Australia’s top audio players, Southern Cross Austereo (SCA) and Nova Entertainment knew they had to crack first-party data if they wanted to stay ahead in a market where ad dollars and audience attention are harder to win.

Both turned to Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) several years ago but their journeys took very different turns. SCA tackled a sprawling, multi-platform Salesforce implementation designed to unify its marketing, ad-serving, and personalisation efforts—overcoming cost management headaches and integration challenges along the way. Nova, meanwhile, bet on mParticle for a more streamlined approach, cutting acquisition costs by up to 30% and driving deeper engagement. 

Progress, and Payoff

Prior to its CDP implementation Southern Cross Austereo (SCA)  was dealing daily with fragmented silos, clunky audience targeting, and a growing need to unify customer interactions across its audio and digital platforms.

As Cameron Strachan, SCA head of data and analytics told Mi3 recently, the media companies were looking to improve approaches to publishing and marketing ultimately settling on Salesforce Data Cloud, consistent with its implementation of the wider Salesforce stack.

"The CDP allows us to use targeted data for acquisition optimisation. Equally, as they're in our environment listening to our content, we want them to stay, so we have use cases around churn reduction, and we use it for machine learning, and also for engagement as well through personalisation and content recommendations".

As a publisher: "The CDP allows us to segment once and use them both for the marketing use case and the commercial use case

Strachan says the project has achieved its goals but it was anything but plug-and-play.

"The challenge for us is nobody had really used data cloud. I think we did a pretty good job. Now, knowing it a little bit more, we could have done a much better job, but we made it work."

SCA wanted a unified approach to audience segmentation, marketing execution, and advertiser insights. The company needed a way to better target users across its audio and digital properties—including LiSTNR, Hit, Triple M, and Press Start—without resorting to manual segmentation.

“The vision of where the CDP in our business needed to get to has been mostly realised,” Strachan said. “But the implementation was really tough, and getting the foundational elements took a lot longer.”

A key challenge was integrating multiple platforms into a cohesive system. “It’s not one harmonious solution,” he noted. “It was really important to have people who understand the different platform components.”

Enter Silverbullet, the implementation partner that helped SCA stitch the various moving parts together, and who Strachan described as invaluable in the implementation

Stitched Stacks

Rather than a single, drop-in solution, SCA’s CDP strategy involved multiple layers:

• Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement for outbound execution (email, push notifications, in-app messaging).
• Salesforce Marketing Cloud Personalisation for in-app content recommendations, web recommendations, and A/B testing.
• Salesforce Data Cloud is the central segmentation layer and data warehouse, integrating real-time and batch data from apps, websites, and survey platforms.

At the heart of the setup is segmentation. The ability to get to the segment that you want—people who are highly engaged in a particular show, for example—is really difficult to do if you don’t have your data all in one place, says Strachan.

"The sophistication of the segmentation layer is the most important thing. To have a powerful segmentation, business-friendly segmentation layer, that's the key thing. So to have them, the data warehouse, plus the model, plus the segmentation layer, is actually the magic."

The Business Impact: What’s Working?

SCA’s CDP project has delivered substantial benefits for advertisers 

The real win for advertisers comes in two key areas says Strachan. "First, it's about gaining access to both their own data and publisher insights before a campaign even launches. That early-stage visibility enables better creative ideation, optimising not just audience targeting but also the creative execution itself."

The second advantage goes back to precision segmentation. "By leveraging internal and external data—particularly clean, privacy-compliant datasets—advertisers can build highly -targeted audiences. When that’s paired with ad server functionality within shows and other media properties, brands can zero in on their ideal consumers with remarkable accuracy."

And then there’s the post-campaign value. By integrating transactional and other performance data, advertisers get a clear view of how well their campaign actually delivered.

But what would Strachan do differently if he had his time again? He acknowledges that some of the advice SCA received early on wasn’t always helpful.

"The thing about Salesforce, Data Cloud, is it comes with a data model. And a data model is a concept in that you have an individual kind of object at the core, and then you've got engagement.  For a business, it's an account and contacts and leads, and that's driven by Salesforce's CRM model that they've had for a million years.

"The thing you have to do architecturally is to shoehorn all your data that's coming in from each data source into the model to make it work. So you've got to understand the relational concepts. Is it really important to have primary and foreign keys and things like that? So build it in the model. But the magic is, once it's in the model, it's you really get the best out of the segmentation. If you've mapped it in the model correctly, then the value is huge. But not every platform is going to be neat and tidy to do that architectural component."

Initially, he says the advice SCA had on that front could have been better - however, he also acknowledged it improved over time.

Road to Monetisation

Three years into its Customer Data Platform (CDP) journey, Nova Entertainment has transformed the way it acquires and engages audiences. The goal? Reduce customer acquisition costs, enhance the listener experience, and—looking ahead—monetise first-party data. But as Nova's Tim Armstrong explains, the path hasn’t been without its challenges, and if they were starting over today, they might take a different approach.

When Nova launched its CDP project in 2021, the rationale was clear: build an ecosystem that could unify customer data across platforms, drive smarter audience acquisition, and eventually create commercial opportunities.

The implementation of CDP was really built around two things, Armstrong said. “One, how do we amplify and radiate the value of first-party data across our business in terms of the way we utilise that and how we use that to drive decisions? And secondly, how we build an ecosystem, or a customer data ecosystem, to really bring that to life across the business.”

For Nova, this meant focusing on two core areas: reducing customer acquisition costs and improving the listener experience to drive engagement and retention.

“We think about that side of the business around how we drive and acquire new audiences in an efficient manner,” Armstrong said. “And then how do we drive improvements in the listener experience? To ensure that once we bring those new people into the ecosystem so that we can nurture and keep them and retain them long term.”

The Solution

After assessing the market, Nova selected mParticle as its CDP. Armstrong noted that the platform’s simplicity and suitability for media businesses made it the right fit.

“In mParticle, we saw four key roles that a CDP needed to play,” Armstrong said. “Standardising the collection of customer data, resolving identity, creating audience segments, and pushing that data downstream for activation.”

Unlike some competitors that have retrofitted CDPs designed for e-commerce, mParticle’s framework aligned well with Nova’s needs. “Armstrong said mParticle was more suitable for media businesses like Nova just in the way that it is set up and implemented. "We chose it because it was simplistic in nature."

While the implementation was relatively smooth, there were hurdles along the way—particularly around integrations.

“A couple of our platforms across the business didn’t necessarily directly integrate with mParticle, and we had to make some custom integration work to get those platforms to talk together,” Armstrong said. “It wasn’t major, but it was enough to impact the roadmap and delay the delivery of a few different things.”

Another challenge? Bringing the organisation along for the ride.

“We knew that earlier on, we would have to take ownership and be the custodians of that platform,” Armstrong said. “Beyond operationalising the CDP and showing value, we also had to be the advocates of change within the business—introducing new capabilities and demonstrating all these things we could now do that we hadn’t been able to do in the past.”

So far, the results have been strong. Nova has seen a 25-30% reduction in customer acquisition costs from digital registration and sign-ups.

“We’ve been able to develop business metrics that go beyond just registrations and downloads,” Armstrong said. “That’s been really important to us in evolving how we think about the new customer journey, right through to the point of what it takes them to get to that point of listening.”

More robust data has also helped drive internal decision-making across content, marketing, and commercial initiatives.

“We’ve seen an increase in return listenership,” Armstrong said. “And we’ve also seen a lot of data that we have radiated back through to the commercial teams, supporting ongoing investment in streaming and podcasting.”

What’s Next: Monetisation and Composability

With its CDP now embedded in operations, Nova is shifting focus to commercial opportunities.

“We continue to hear and see competitors monetising first-party data and leveraging clean rooms,” Armstrong said. “We’re very much on a similar journey and trajectory when it comes to that.”

Looking back, Armstrong acknowledged that the landscape has evolved. If Nova were making the decision today, they might choose a different path.

“Honestly, I would probably opt for a composable CDP,” he said.

The rise of composability, Armstrong noted, has changed the game. “In the audio space, we operate in a relatively fragmented ecosystem from a consumption point of view, where first-party data signals are only available on a certain portion of our listening,” he said. “A more composable CDP solution actually probably works better with that.”

Nova has deliberately built a composable technology stack, and Armstrong sees further opportunities to embrace that flexibility. “We’ve been very good at building a composable stack, but now I think there are opportunities around more composable components within that stack,” he said.