Local news sites already contain one of the best environments for local advertisers: the right audience in the right context.
Trinity Mirror, which bills itself as the largest national and regional multimedia content publisher in the UK, isn’t stopping there. By adding location data to the mix, Trinity Mirror’s news sites help 1 million advertisers drill even deeper to find the right customers.
When users read articles from one of Trinity Mirror’s news sites, the publisher tracks their location within a 10-meter radius. Finnish location vendor Beemray helps Trinity Mirror decipher that data by organizing what coffee shops and stores users visit, which readers might commute into work and how that factor matches to the content they consume.
Beemray then loads that information into Trinity’s data management platform (DMP), where it can be used to target campaigns.
“We want to provide an extra layer of service – to bring in historical location behavior as well as real-time locational targeting,” said Amir Malik, programmatic digital director of Trinity Mirror.
Beemray, which charges customers a SaaS fee, sees itself as an ad tech partner that can help publishers increase their overall revenue, not just take a cut in the middle.
“Publisher revenues are dwindling due to programmatic, so publishers need to be able to build their own audience strategy,” noted Raman Sidhu, business development VP at Beemray. “We add value to the top of the food chain by enabling them to collect and protect data from their users.”
While adding any targeting parameter can winnow scale, Trinity Mirror properties attract huge local audiences across England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, allowing them to develop a comprehensive picture of those markets. Marketers don’t need to sacrifice reach.
“Seventy-five percent of people in Manchester go to Manchester Evening News every month, which is 3% higher than the BBC,” Malik said. “We can geofence and build real intelligence for advertisers and brands [across that audience].”
The solution, first introduced six months ago, has already attracted Nestlé. The confectioner wanted to target mothers of small children, so Trinity Mirror and Beemray looked for online visits to nursery schools and toy stores to develop an addressable audience. Trinity Mirror also pulled in content behavior that suggested the reader was a mom – a way of enriching the data that’s unique to the publisher.
Location data also helps with measuring performance, not just impact. Trinity Mirror plans to use location data to show “how digital advertising is influencing footfall as well as revealing the path to conversion for performance advertisers,” Malik added.
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Trinity Mirror, which also manages marketing campaigns for some of its local advertisers, is starting to test audience extension using this data, allowing advertisers to increase the reach of campaigns.
The publication has built a programmatic infrastructure consisting of six programmatic analysts, three data analysts and a sales team to execute its plans, said Malik, who previously worked at Google serving the buy side.
While location data is still in its early days, it’s been the province of buyers. But there are good reasons for publishers to pursue this data, particularly those that can collect and keep data from first-party cookies on mobile. Mobile is decidedly less friendly to data intermediaries because they aren’t allowed to drop third-party cookies.
“Large-scale publishers have a huge opportunity with first-party data as they aggregate many different audiences, and mobile data technologies will be instrumental in devising this plan,” Malik said.
