HONG KONG, 29 June 2020 – The South China Morning Post, a leading global media company, announced today the launch of ‘SCMP LIGHTHOUSE’ – a sophisticated first-party data platform that offers marketers unparalleled consumer insights to drive efficiencies and improve their campaign’s ROI.
As the first news media organisation in Asia to launch a proprietary insight and activation platform based on its first-party data , ‘SCMP LIGHTHOUSE’ provides advertisers with the tools necessary to target audiences with greater precision. Built on SCMP’s first-party cookies with known recency, provenance and quality, this free and transparent insight tool will allow users to create bespoke audiences on SCMP’s profiles, discover insights in real-time, and easily compare them across geographies.
Developed with privacy at its core and on publisher first-party cookies, ‘SCMP LIGHTHOUSE’ was created as a proprietary in-house platform and leverages on the Post’s global readership of more than 50m monthly average users (MAU) across key territories such as the USA (37%), Asia (32%) and the rest of the world (31%). The platform offers access to quality audience insights and allows partners to activate against geo-specific attributes to bring incremental audiences and value to marketers.
“This platform is our answer to the rising governmental and browser regulations and the negative impact it has had on marketers ability to target important and valuable audiences,“ said SCMP’s Vice President of Digital Ian Hocking. “We believe that publishers are best placed to target users with value-added data that can build strategic partnerships.”
“This is an important step for SCMP. Having scaled, adding value with first-party data means we can understand the value a user sees in SCMP and connect an advertiser via our trusted first-party relationship. The launch of ‘SCMP LIGHTHOUSE’ marks our commitment to helping our business and advertising partners understand our global audience so we can continue to deliver news and advertising content that adds value to our readers.”
To implement ‘SCMP LIGHTHOUSE’, the Post partnered with 1PlusX to help marketers and publishers unlock the full potential of SCMP’s rich data by extrapolating and aggregating information from various data pools and predicting behavioral trends and patterns from robust data processing and data modeling.
“The launch of SCMP LIGHTHOUSE marks an important milestone and I strongly believe marketers will substantially profit from the platform’s ability to portray transparent data insights supported by our predictive technology,’’ said Jürgen Galler, CEO at 1plusX. ““A whole spectrum of new audience capabilities can be generated and when applied holistically, the platform will enable SCMP to drive data intelligence in the future.
“The launch of SCMP LIGHTHOUSE highlights our dynamic and stimulating collaboration with the Post and we look forward to continue challenging the status quo in the international digital advertising space together.”
Kindly visit advertising.scmp.com and email rica.raubenheimer@scmp.com for more details about ‘SCMP LIGHTHOUSE’.
FACTSHEET: SCMP LIGHTHOUSE
What is SCMP LIGHTHOUSE?
SCMP LIGHTHOUSE is a proprietary in-house platform for marketers to create bespoke audiences on SCMP’s profiles, discover insights in real-time that is based on Post’s robust global readership. The platform utilises first-party data in a combination of declared data from polls and quizzes with observed onsite user behaviours, Google Analytics, ad-log data and other content analytics to go beyond interest and intent to measure engagement and make insights available for targeting and reporting.
What’s driving the need for first-party data?
Google announced in January 2020 that third-party cookies would be blocked in Chrome within two years, at which point they will be effectively useless for all use cases. Google, Apple, Firefox and Brave have been clamping down on fingerprinting techniques and the upshot is that we all need to find a new digital currency for targeting and measurement.
How does SCMP provide value to marketers using first-party data?
As news publishers, SCMP has a relationship with our readers and knows its audience better than anyone else through its users’ first-party data. Understanding our users and creating a platform allows us and advertisers to recognise that value. The move towards a single-sign in and persistent ID also allows us to build editorial impact and deeper engagement with readers through a greater personalised experience. Through SCMP LIGHTHOUSE, the Post is able to demonstrate the value of its audience by giving access to insights on readers.
What are the benefits of building your own data platform?
The first thing you should enable is greater business efficiencies. Giving your whole business access to your consumer data in a privacy compliant self-service platform will enable your staff to react faster and with validated insight.
Because it’s curated insight, you create a consistent way of talking about your audience throughout the company and you are able to control access and measure usage, whilst contextualising each insight so it’s easy to interpret no matter the relative data competency of that user.
By building your own platform, you are able to take advantage of any unique data you may have access to (adding a USP for potential partnerships) and you’ll also be able to build out functionality in a modular way, responding quickly to market conditions and opportunities.
Lastly, but most importantly, you will be in control of the data quality and ensure that your product truly adds value for your partners and to your business decisions.
For more details about ‘SCMP LIGHTHOUSE’, please contact Rica Raubenheimer, Digital Product Manager at rica.raubenheimer@scmp.com.
ABOUT SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST
The South China Morning Post is a leading global news company that has reported on China and Asia for more than a century. Founded in 1903, SCMP is headquartered in Hong Kong, where it is the city’s newspaper of record, with a growing correspondent staff across Asia and the United States. SCMP’s vision is to “Elevate Thought” and our mission is to “Lead the global conversation about China”. Additionally, SCMP publishes a portfolio of premium lifestyle and fashion titles in Hong Kong including Cosmopolitan, ELLE, Esquire and, Harper’s BAZAAR. SCMP is also home to Abacus, a digital news brand focused on China’s tech industry; Inkstone, a daily news brief for those curious about China’s growing impact around the world; and Goldthread, a content platform with a focus on food, travel and culture in China. In 2020, SCMP became the first news organisation in Asia to join the Trust Project, a consortium of top news companies developing global transparency standards for credible journalism.
For further information on SCMP, please contact: sarah.wai@scmp.com
ABOUT 1PlusX
1plusX is an advanced data management and predictive marketing platform. Developed by two ex-Google directors, our solutions leverage the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning enabling digital businesses to unlock the full potential of their data. By connecting information pools across various digital channels and touchpoints, our platform recognizes patterns in user behavior. Within milliseconds, those are transformed into predictions and meaningful customer insights. This is how publishers and marketers can turn anonymous visitors into known audiences boosting the value of their marketing spend. 1plusX’s international team based in Zurich, Hamburg, Paris, and Singapore is composed of over 30 talents from the international product and engineering scene.