How the AFL is tapping into consumer data with Audience360 partnership

Australian data provider Audience360 added another big brand to its portfolio of clients earlier this month when it entered into a partnership with the AFL.

The company also has contracts with Australia Post, ANZ, Audi, Volvo, Crown resorts, Woolworths, Webjet.com, Carsales.com and Finder.com. “We work with a number of #1s in different categories,” Audience360 managing director Penny Kee told Mediaweek.

“Generally the way I explain what we do is we connect advertisers with data so that they can reach their customers in the most effective way. The data we work with is all non-personally identifiable data. It’s not personally identifiable information at all. It is all re-marketing data, so we look at things like cookies and device ID.”

Audience360 MD Penny Kee

The organisation’s partnership with AFL will see the latter offering clients programmatic campaigns with 100% transparent data, targeting current consumers at a granular level.

Kee explained: “They have a massive website, which reaches about 20% of the online population in Australia – particularly during the peak AFL season. However, as a consumer we are all very active online. Therefore, while 20% of the online population may go to AFL.com, they only spend under 2% of their time online on the website. The other 98% of the time is spent on various other websites.

"Our job is to then correctly identify those people and target ads for them. With that as a sponsor, a company can maximise its influence on the AFL site and then continue that conversation with a consumer when they go away and check what the weather is going to be like, check the news or whatever it may be.”

Penny Kee and AFL Commercial Manager Kylie Rogers

Currently, Audience360 captures over 500 million cookies a month, which are categorised into over 8,000 audience segments.

Perth-based Damian Cook founded the company in 2012. It was born from an ad network that Cook had founded about seven years ago called Digital Niche. Kee joined Audience360 in 2017. She previously worked at its client firm, Carsales, where she was the GM of its corporate sales division called MediaMotive.

Having already got a number of recognisable brands on its roster of clients, what is the biggest growth opportunity for Audience360?

“Advertisers are taking an active interest in their programmatic buys and the audience data that is being used, particularly around where this data comes from and how it is formed,” Kee said. “This is being driven by the constant need to improve ROI on media spend and the global review of consumer privacy laws through the likes of GDPR.

“At Audience360 we will see our growth come from the data consult area of the business that enables advertisers and agencies to activate our exclusive audience data in their own platforms while working with our team to deliver the best outcomes.”

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Top photo credit: Neale Cousland / Shutterstock