Nine builds out single view of customer on GCP foundation

Nine Entertainment is continuing to refine a single view of customer capability it has built on a Google Cloud foundation, using it to inform content direction, marketing and advertising, among other uses.

Chief data officer Suzie Cardwell told the recent Google Cloud Summit 2024 in Sydney that the media company – formed from the amalgam of Nine Television, Fairfax Media, Macquarie Radio and Stan – has spent the past six years consolidating group data in Google Cloud Platform (GCP), with BigQuery acting as the central data warehouse.

“We had multiple data warehouses, sitting on multiple clouds as well as on-prem, all collecting and handling data in different ways,” Cardwell said.

“Over the last six years, the team has done the work to consolidate almost all of those data sources onto GCP. 

“We’re still not quite there, but we will be shortly.”

Cardwell said that BigQuery enabled Nine to “optimally structure and format our data for large analytical workloads.”

“It also gives us the performance to help analyse and activate data in real-time for the marketing, subscription and content optimisation activities our teams need to undertake,” she said.

Across the group, billions of audience data points are collected – “in a transparent and privacy-complying way” – each month.

A key use case for all of this data is a single view of customer capability that is powered by “a combination of technologies including BigQuery, a customer data platform and our proprietary identity resolution system,” Cardwell said.

“This single view of the consumer will increasingly underpin our audience marketing activity, our subscription sales, our experience personalisation and our product development.”

Journalists, content creators and programmers at Nine are able to use self-service visualisations of the data – developed with Google’s Looker business intelligence platform – “to help them understand what’s being consumed by our various audiences”

“It helps our editors, our journalists and our marketers understand what’s driving engagement or paywall conversions, and equally importantly what’s not,” Cardwell said.

“The teams have built thousands of their own dashboards [in Looker] looking at metrics specific to their areas of the business.

“These dashboards are used every day by our editors, journalists and content producers to understand what we should be making more of to get people to read, watch and subscribe more. 

“The data is directly powering our revenue generation.”

The single view of customer capability is also being used to build out a suite of “targeted advertising products” that are intended to create value for advertisers, Cardwell said.

“The product suite includes 9Tribes, which is a proprietary segmentation [tool] which finds intenders in most product categories.

Intenders are a cohort of the audience whose actions and behaviours suggest they’d be receptive to certain marketing messages or products.

The advertising products also include an “audience match” tool, “where we work with a number of ‘cleanrooms’ to allow advertisers to match their data with our first-party audience data to help them find their customers across our network. 

“The suite gives our advertisers a full final solution and it helps them meet their customers at whatever stage of the purchase journey they’re in,” Cardwell said.

In addition, Cardwell said the single view of its customers is also being used to improve content recommendations to the audience and to alter the frequency with which advertisements are displayed.