What you need to know:

• News Corp Australia has secured an exclusive partnership with ad-supported streamer Tubi, owned by Fox Corp, marking a major push into Australia’s competitive streaming video market.
• The deal headlined the publisher's annual upfront style event on Tuesday evening, with News touting capability across the funnel from brand to demand and closing a key chink in its armour amid rising competitive threat.
• Already drawing circa 1.3 million Australian viewers monthly without marketing, MD of client partnerships Lou Barrett reckons News will quickly double Tubi’s audience. If News can walk the talk, it would put the free ad-supported streamer in the same ballpark as Paramount Australia’s BVOD, 10Play, sitting at circa 2.5m monthly viewers as of December 2024.
• Audience intelligence platform Intent Connect is also getting 10 new AI-driven capabilities, intended to find higher value audiences more easily across platforms.
• The pitch was stuffed with case studies from Chemist Warehouse, Mars Petcare, Inspiring Vacations, and Subway – with News outmuscling tech platform rivals to land the latter's lunchtime campaign, creating new formats, hitting audiences just before lunch – and driving 3 per cent sales growth, with that claim backed by Subway marketing boss Rodica Titeica.
• News execs made a concerted effort to tie everything back to 'engaged reach', which as a heuristic is "page views divided by unique audience", per Barrett, but also wraps in time on site, frequency of returns etc.
• The aim is to distance the Murdoch-owned outfit from algorithm-driven, passive engagement on Meta and Tiktok, while throwing shade on basic reach metrics increasingly questioned by marketing scientists. 

Subway marketing boss Rodica Titeica has bought in to News Corp's theory that 'engaged reach' trumps standard reach-only approaches. News outmuscled tech platform rivals to deliver a targeted campaign Titeica told marketers at its upfront-style event had re-engaged lapsed demos and delivered 3 per cent sales uplift – no mean feat in hyper competitive QSR. 

News Corp now wants a percentage of the streaming ad market, eyeing the coffers of BVOD rivals via a local exclusivity deal with US streaming giant Tubi – and plugging it into a CDP and audience intelligence platform moving through the gears. On face value, it's selling ads for a Fox Corp-owned platform – but it also fills a gap in News' arsenal given publishing audiences will likely be winding down in the evening and watching TV. Plus, it's an opportunity to gather a fresh set of data signals.

News reckons its stack, cross-platform reach (it claims 17.5m Australians monthly, from which it is hoovering 2.5bn "intent signals") and sales capability gives it an edge on global streamers now piling into ads locally.

Plus it's hammering the message that engaged reach  – simplified by execs as "page views divided by unique audience" – is the new metric that matters, because reach alone will not drive growth.

It wheeled out marketers from Chemist Warehouse, Mars Petcare and Inspired Vacations to back that view with hard proof-points.

As well as being a fundamental shift in approach, per client MD Lou Barrett, the engagement metrics message was an intended jab at (and attempted differentiator to) global platform walled gardens.

"We're not talking about hours of passive scrolling on platforms like Instagram and Tiktok," Barrett told the packed out ICC auditorium. "We're talking about active engagement driven by genuine interest, not driven by algorithms."

"This is how we understand your customers better. We don't just guess they're a sports fan based on a fleeting 15 second clip. We know they're a sports fan because they consistently engage with in depth, match analysis, reviews and analysis of other sort, every single week."

GM of commercial data Dean La Rosa said engaged reach metrics are augmented by "capturing high quality signals which are more accurate, more relevant and more reliable, which tell us when audiences are ready to act". Whereas he claimed "deeply flawed" data is currently driving the bulk of digital ad spend, "impacted by gaps in technology", and "often based on incomplete or contradictory behavioural signals and bundled together without any transparency or commitment to accuracy".

The paucity of data underpinning much of the $700bn global digital ad market is a message many have been making. La Rosa backed that view.

"Consumers are frequently mislabeled or placed into segments based only on shallow interactions. In essence, it leads to signal loss and your wasted ad dollars."

As seen on TV

The expansion into connected TV (CTV) marks a turf incursion on local rivals as well as an offensive-defensive play as global streamers ramp up ads, but have not yet built out sophisticated local sales infrastructure. 

Tubi claims 97 million monthly active users globally, which get free access to circa 275,000 movies and TV shows available. It has about 1.3 million monthly viewers in Australia with virtually zero marketing, and Barrett is aiming to quickly double that number by "throwing a bit of the News Corp infrastructure behind that and start promoting it to consumers".

She made marketing sound easy. “It's a free streaming service, so you just have to tell people about it.” If News can walk the talk, it would put Tubi close to some of the BVOD players current numbers, and potentially beyond some of the streamers' ad tiers.

Paramount has said 10Play ended 2024 with an average monthly audience of 2.5 million. While Nine and Seven didn’t publish BVOD audience figures for the last ratings year, their commercial share of the BVOD market (excluding SBS) is likely reflective – 45 and 38.6 per cent, respectively, per OzTam, against Ten’s 16.4 per cent.

Netflix touted 800,000 monthly users on its ad tier last September, and Prime rolled its circa 5 million users onto an ad-supported service in July – though there’s likely been some drop off as subscribers bump up to ad-free.

Pippa Leary, MD & Publisher, Free News & Lifestyle, said accessing the “big screen in the lounge room”, and the ability to “sell targeted ads that are full screen, unskippable, with sounds on” as a new strategic capability.

News is now in the process of integrating Tubi into the Intent Connect platform, which means more signals and more places to both collect and activate against them for a predominantly younger-skewing audience.

Tubi’s executive vice president and managing director, David Salmon, likewise welcomed the opportunity for the streamer to ratchet up growth in the Australian market amid a “seismic shift in where and how content is being consumed”.

Marketer proof reel

News Australia pushed case studies hard to prove its multi-year build of a data-audience stack is now firing.

Chemist Warehouse's integration of its content hub, The House of Wellness, into News' Body+Soul platform cut bounce rates by 50 per cent and drove gains in traffic, engagement and revenue for Chemist Warehouse and its suppliers. Which likely means more retail media dollars.

Mars Petcare’s ‘Pet Sense’ integration with news.com.au was created after "misinformation" about ingredients circulating on the usual channels damaged sales of some brands. So News co-created a Pet Sense content hub which reached a claimed 3 million Australians and scored highly on relevancy and differentiation – though there were no hard sales figures.

Tour operator Inspiring Vacations added to the proof points with evidence that print and digital can deliver for the category. Using 'buy now' audience segments, the blended strategy drove a 30 per cent uplift in purchase intent, tripled conversion, and 40 per cent more lift per dollar than print alone.

Subway: Got bigger

Subway was the big one, with News having landed the campaign over local competitors and major global platforms – the likes of Amazon, Google and Meta. Hence throwing the kitchen sink at it. Per Pippa Leary: “Every piece of product innovation you’ve ever seen at D_Coded, everything over the last six years was rolled up to answer this pitch”.

The challenge was to reach Subway's target audience during the key lunch ‘trigger window’ period of 10am to 1pm. Subway is a challenger in QSR, so had to do so with considerably less budget than local big guns.

Unwrapping the challenge on stage, Subway director of marketing Rodica Titeica said it delivered.

"Dramatic" shifts in consumer behaviour in the months before the brief had driven the push and opened the purse strings to address it. QSR visitation had halved, per Titeica, and “most of the contraction came at lunchtime”.

Given the sustained cost of living squeeze, "Aussies were bringing lunch from home, and critically, many white-collar professionals were skipping lunch altogether,” was an insight News surfaced.

Tapping News’ Content Connect feature, Subway was able to find the "moments within the trigger window" in which Subway could “make the biggest splash” – maximising reach via insights that pointed out the best devices and right locations to target.

"The insights then helped to further refine our challenge, and we needed to then remind busy professionals why Subway was the best option for convenient, healthy, satisfying meal options. [So] Customer Match allowed us to target what is really, for us, a pretty hard to reach audience, and then [it] helped us engage with the messaging, the formats, all of that in a way that was relevant to them.”

Subway, as a result, saw “measurable uplift” in a demographic that “had been lapsed entirely”. More broadly, the franchise recorded a 50 per cent uplift in foot traffic and a three per cent sales lift over the duration of the campaign.

According to Titeica, both management and Subway franchisees on the frontline of consumer spending squeezes were happy.

“The impact that we had with it for the brand was something that we heard a lot from multiple layers across the business, so that was great.”

Intent Connect upgrade

As well as bringing Tubi into the platform, upgraded capability for Intent Connect was the second major agenda item for News Australia’s advertiser pitch, with the publisher promising to deliver more accurate and efficient data-driven targeting via a suite of ten new AI-powered features set to land this year.

Four of the ten were showcased on the big screen:

• (C)AI Segment Builder: An evolution of last year’s AI chatbot, CAI is now a sophisticated Large Language Model trained on News Corp’s digital data. The rejigged bot will allow advertisers to describe their ideal audience, using AI to build an optimised audience segment that leverages first-party and partner data.
• Recommendation Engine: This analyses user behaviours, interests, and intent, to uncover patterns and provides data-driven recommendations to enhance campaigns against data points that closely align with a client’s target audience.
• Content Connect: Upgraded with first party and partner data integration, the refreshed contextual targeting tool provides a more detailed understanding of audience interests and behaviours.
• Campaign and Attribution Summary: A real-time analytics tool that delivers real time analysis of campaign delivery and performance, actionable insights and optimisation recommendations in a single dashboard.

Per Barrett, said the upgrades will drive “active engagement with audiences”, drilling down on “genuine intent” and “real action”. La Rosa claimed the tech is backed by “the most compelling and privacy compliant data proposition in the market”.