News Corp Australia

News Corp Australia is one of the leading media global companies. 18 million Australians visit their suite of multi-platform products for news and information every month – more than any other media group in Australia. News Corp Australia’s portfolio of brands include The Australian and The Herald Sun as well as allied media enterprises like Foxtel, FOX Sports, the REA Group. 

We interviewed Lionel Port, Head of Data Technology at News Corp Australia. Lionel sits at the intersection between data and business value. His team is focused on how to enable more targeted experiences for News Corp Australia’s diverse online readership and advertisers seeking to reach relevant audiences. Lionel and his team selected Vidora to help automate machine learning and optimize for business decisioning in order to build personalized brand experiences across News Corp Australia’s 18 million monthly visitors.

Challenges

Online publishers in today’s digital ecosystem have access to unprecedented amounts of 1st party data. Access to this large pool of data creates unique opportunities to provide data-driven consumer experiences to users as well as automate data-driven business processes and decisions.

Lionel’s team manages continuous streams of large scale data to create highly relevant advertising segments. In addition to creating these user segments, his team wants to optimize business decisions around personalized and targeted experiences to attract and drive advertising revenue. 

Vidora plays an important role in News Corp Australia’s strategy by enabling the rapid creation of advertising cohorts and empowering their team to take full advantage of real-time and batch data to make the best decisions for every user. With the help of Vidora’s cutting edge machine learning technology, News Corp Australia is able to optimize and automate their business decisions.

Lionel’s team encountered several challenges when building their large-scale ad segments including –

• The arduous work surrounding preparing data sets (data analysis, data cleansing, feature selection, etc.) 
• Working with ultra-large scale data (18 million monthly unique users) to featurize and build segments
• Not having the ability to quickly run experiments and test new hypotheses

Using Cortex

News Corp Australia needed a machine learning solution to integrate into their team’s continuous data workflows. They wanted to automate the creation of custom audience segments as well as be able to make better business decisions with their large scale data. 

Cortex processed large scale 1st party data across 18 million News Corp Australian interactions including behavioral data and user attributes.

Business Value

Vidora’s partnership with News Corp Australia enabled Lionel’s team to resolve the pain points they encountered when it came to their current machine learning operations. Cortex was able to provide the following across data from 18m News Corp Australia users –

• An automated process of preparing data sets for ML pipelines
• Lower costs
• Ability to build a machine learning pipeline in minutes
• Ability to quickly experiment with new cohorts and optimization goals

Conclusion

As a leading media publisher, News Corp Australia understands that being able to quickly create relevant advertising segments is the key driver in boosting their ROI throughout their site. Vidora automates the process of building user segments, which allows News Corp Australia to set up high-performing automated decisions throughout their business.

Since partnering with Vidora, News Corp Australia has increased their ability to drive new advertising revenue using 1st party data. With the combination of Cortex and Vidora’s customer success team, Lionel and his data technology team are able to run their data operations at scale. Instead of waiting weeks, they are able to transform their continuous raw data into ML predictions and business decisions in just a matter of days.