Hearst Magazines UK
Using Captify's Sense product, we helped Hearst Magazines identify new audiences in a world beyond Google's walled gardens. Scroll down to find out more.
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In today’s challenging market, being confident in the audiences you are targeting and spending your valuable marketing budget on, has never been more important. Marketers are feeling the pressure to “sweat every pound” and having an accurate audience strategy is essential to avoiding media wastage.
Our Audience Intelligence team are constantly looking for new and innovative ways of enhancing our offering. The team live and breathe being able to accurately identify best-fit audiences for advertisers to plug into their targeting. We continually strive to provide watertight solutions that will enable businesses to focus their marketing efforts (and £££s) on the most effective groups to achieve their goals.
We have long used search data to inform and shape these decisions. However, when we heard about a new cookieless search intelligence tool which promised to “make sense of search data to build fresh audiences for targeting and reveal actionable insights for decisions”, our ears pricked up.
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Captify is the leading search intelligence platform for the open web and the largest independent holder of search data outside of the walled gardens; connecting the real-time searches from over 1.6 billion devices globally.
Its search intelligence technology powers omnichannel programmatic advertising, but what really sealed the deal for us, was Captify’s ‘Sense’ platform.
Sense is a self-serve product which has the ability to marry-up search insights with audiences. Where previously, marketers had to instinctively crossmatch searches to audiences, we are now able to get this from Captify. Sense reveals which audiences our brands should be targeting, based on real-time search insights – and all without the reliance on third-party cookies. It’s fair to say, we were sold.
Shortly after adding Captify to our Audience Intelligence tech stack, we received a brief from Hearst Magazines, which the platform lent itself perfectly to. Our contacts at Hearst wanted to understand the evolving sustainability landscape by finding out the audiences, triggers and barriers that drive sustainable choices across five key verticals: fashion, food, homes, beauty and auto.
Sense became a crucial part of our research process for this brief – helping to connect the gap between hypotheses and real behaviour and put consumer intent at the heart of strategic planning. We were able to apply a real-time search lens to consumer behaviours around sustainability and build custom audiences across the target verticals; revealing the top profiles, their interests, motivations and triggers that drive their eco-conscious decisions, behaviour and intent.
Sense provided a fresh, rich and granular understanding of each audience, unlocking insights on their shared lifestyles, passions and interests.
For instance, we were able to determine that sustainable fashion audiences are:
3.18x more likely to be Social Media Enthusiasts
Motivation: an image conscious profile who want to be seen as eco-friendly.
2.99x more likely to have a Luxury Lifestyle
Why: the designer rental market continues to grow, and sustainable products tend to be at a higher price point.
1.95x more likely to be interested in technology
Attribute: consumers place importance on eco-friendly, innovative materials across their wider purchase behaviours.
This method was repeated for each of the other four briefed verticals – helping us to shape a clear picture of the most opportunistic audiences across each vertical, to present back to our client.
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Ryan D'Cruz - Group Strategy Director at Hearst UK
Feedback from Hearst Magazines was tremendously positive, and we later learnt that the insights contributed to a £150k win in new business for the business.
Ryan D’Cruz, Group Strategy Director at Hearst said:
“Hearst worked closely with iCrossing to dive deeper into the subject of sustainability and get a better understanding of different audience segments that exist across our key verticals who are driven by sustainable choices. The use of Captify to create these segments helped bring these sustainability-driven audiences to life and help people across our business understand the triggers and opportunities to engage this audience. We presented the findings of the Sustainability research internally to both commercial and editorial teams – helping us create more effective content as a publisher and enabling us to better respond to commercial briefs.”
Contact
If your brand is in need of a target audience overhaul, or you’re interested in hearing how our data-backed solutions could help to validate or refine your audience strategy, we would love to hear from you. Our audience intelligence products have supported brands both at national and international level – and with an impressive tech stack, which allows us to overlay insight from multiple audience intelligence sources.