Dive Brief:
- News Corp, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal, HarperCollins Publishers, MarketWatch and other verticals, launched a new programmatic platform that aims to streamline its advertising tools and address brand safety concerns, according to a press release by the company.
- Called News IQ, the platform plans to merge first-party data from its range of partners, including Fox Broadcasting Company, the agency Dentsu Aegis Network and Seabourn Cruise Line, with News Corp's own global data to help advertisers build targeted audience segments.
- This is the first time News Corp has integrated its stream of data, media properties and data science tools into one platform. It promises to build "three layers of brand safety for every campaign" and offer greater fraud protection, the release said.
Dive Insight:
With News IQ, News Corp aims to tackle several of marketers' top concerns with digital advertising this year, namely brand safety, transparency and the gathering of solid, actionable data on online consumers. The former two areas are ones where the largest digital advertising platforms, Google and Facebook, have frequently fallen short in 2017, spurring greater demand for a third major player in the space to create more competition with the so-called duopoly.
Brand safety has been top-of-mind for marketers since ads for companies appeared next to content featuring hate speech and violence on Google's YouTube, leading to advertiser boycotts in the spring. Late last month, the video platform landed in hot water again after Mars, Lidl, Adidas and others froze their spending over ads running on questionable content that drew comments from pedophiles.
Promising not only brand safety, News IQ is touting its transparent approach and ability to intelligently build audiences — a smart move as many marketers have raised concern over the lack of transparency in digital media. By combining data from individual advertisers and News Corp, the ad platform boasts a larger inventory of data and metrics to help brands better segment and target their audiences.
Identifying what makes for good data and how to strategically apply it in marketing is an ongoing struggle in the space. Marketers earned an average grade of C-minus for their "marketing intelligence capabilities," including data management, activation, benchmarking and other processes or systems that help translate their massive data into actionable results, according to a recent analysis by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Velocidi.
The news comes just months after News Corp named a new head of digital advertising solutions, pointing to the company's larger push toward beefing up its arsenal of ad tools to attract more big-name brands.
