How ‘the Swiss Army knife of data management’ tackles third-party data loss

Challenge:

From print to digital, from written to spoken words and beyond, Jysk Fynske Medier (JFM) is the second largest Danish news publisher and media group. It is the driving force behind more than 75 newspapers, a wide range of news sites and digital brands. This includes its advertising and communications agency, STEP, where JFM runs technology and data projects for the media group. Understanding its readership and customers is essential to JFM’s success, making collecting and analysing data from over 140 different websites business critical.

The JFM team based at STEP realised its audience sales could be threatened by the new third-party data regulations and advanced Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP). It needed to find a more efficient way to collect and analyse first-party customer data.

JFM’s initial Data Management Platform (DMP) – installed in 2016 – was designed to support advertising across the group’s media properties.

The problem was that it couldn’t keep up with modern data insight requirements. It didn’t allow for single customer views, complicated the scripting process on the various webpages in JFM’s portfolio, and wasn’t a vendor-neutral solution.

The business needed a tool that would provide insights based on first-party data from across the whole company, and from a disparate number of websites, platforms, and media assets.

Solution:

JFM introduced and implemented Tealium’s AudienceStream CDP and iQ Tag Management to close the gaps left by the previous DMP and to tackle the new challenges.

Tealium’s implementation engineers and customer team provided constant, high-quality support during the set up across the business. This was particularly helpful as JFM defined use cases on the go.

One of the main priorities was to enable a holistic view of every customer. Tealium AudienceStream CDP delivered exactly that – based on clean first-party data from different touchpoints across the various websites.

Using AudienceStream CDP for ID Management enabled JFM to work with vendors’ first-party solutions in the programmatic adtech space for activation. It allowed JFM to interact with the customers and subscribers on an individual basis rather than targeting broad segments or groups, while prioritising privacy through cookie audiences.

This new view allowed for optimised personalisation via email as well as on the websites through cloud-based analysis of individuals’ preferences and interests. JFM developed a personalisation algorithm in the cloud, based on behavioural data and reading patterns.

This information was collated by Tealium’s solution and used within the website Content Management System (CMS), where individual recommendations were activated and sent and user recognition was enabled. So when users returned to the website later, they received personalised recommendations: for example, suggestions of articles that matched the users’ previous reading habits and interests.

The CDP also enabled JFM to capture email addresses from users, which acted as a more persistent ID compared to other forms of customer/user ID, which optimised the accuracy of the personalisation process.

The newly implemented system also provides the option to move the ‘heavy technology’ that can slow down the pages to the server and off the client side. This resulted in faster processes and a better customer experience. As JFM runs several websites, having Tealium iQ Tag Management as a central solution allowed the IT department to manage tags on different websites without having to edit the page code. Plus, once the universal tags had been set, the team could adjust the tags centrally (e.g. adding some) and the changes were directly published on the respective sites making processes faster and simpler.

Tealium’s flexibility and interoperability with technologies from various vendors is helping future-proof the solution and deliver further returns on the investment. This will also help JFM’s plans towards the usage of machine-learning tools, which demands a clean and extended data set as provided by Tealium AudienceStream.

“The impact of regulatory changes around third-party data is a major challenge particularly when looking at the amount of websites and publishing assets under the JFM portfolio. Tealium AudienceStream and iQ Tag Management really was the Swiss army knife of data management systems for us. It’s flexible and applicable to various use cases, which often came up spontaneously. Its capability of providing us with a holistic customer view that enabled an optimised personalisation and targeting process, allows us to not only survive, but thrive, in the marketing jungle.”  Dennis Vesti Brorsen, Head of Data & Intelligence, Jysk Fynske Medier 

Results:

With the help of Tealium AudienceStream and iQ Tag Management, it was instantly possible for JFM to access a new kind of first-party customer data. This has helped reach their advertising goals and increased the performance fourfold in comparison to the market. In the long run, this single customer view will help to stay on top of the audience needs, despite the loss of thirdparty cookies.

The holistic view of their users enabled JFM not only to optimise its approach and interaction with customers but also the editorial processes on the journalist side. Insight into customer behaviour, such as reading time of articles, scroll depths, the number of clicks and the number of times it was shared, led to the creation of a qualitative score. On the basis of this scale, journalists can adjust articles to increase their performance.

The installation also had financial benefits – apart from increasing the audience sales. Overall, JFM saw a 4x return on its investment, following the deployment.

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