Grupo Clarín believes that, as a product, it is important to reach everyone. But from a commercial perspective, the real challenge is reaching the right person at the right time. 

To do that, they focus on developing strategies to reach increasingly specific audiences, combining data analysis with innovative advertising formats.

Matías Franco, product and consumer technology manager at the Argentinian news company, explained to attendees at the recent INMA Latin American Conference how accurate data makes it possible to analyse the habits and needs of the audience, thereby helping the team create relevant campaigns and content tailored to each audience profile.

“We started to look for tools that would enable us to understand our audiences and also for our advertisers,” Franco said.

The power of data collection

Grupo Clarín developed a powerful data collection and analysis tool that allows the team to:

• Measure all user activity on its sites.

• Understand habits, interests, and needs.

• Anticipate behaviours and adapt both content and campaigns.

This level of data intelligence allows Grupo Clarín to build detailed profiles of its audiences with robust insights.

“We wanted the tool to connect to other tools to be able to show the correct type of ad in the correct format to each audience,” Franco said. “The tool is very powerful and allows us to do many things.”

The first question the team asked themselves was, ”How can we build our audience through this tool?”

What the data found

Once the team started measuring all the interactions with their audience, they started to analyse and understand what is going on with them, Franco said. Through that they were able to draw some conclusions:

• The audience was diverse and powerful — decision-makers who have the capacity to influence their consumer environments.

• The audience segments included CEOs and corporate leaders, entrepreneurs, farm owners, marketing managers, politicians, and public figures.

“We tried to understand what we could do to impact these people,” Franco said, adding that Grupo Clarín’s advertisers were also diverse.

The team began developing segmentations, combining multiple criteria to create unique audiences and deliver personalised campaigns, maximising relevance and performance.

Segmentation criteria were:

• Topics of interest.

• Reader type traffic acquisition.

• Geolocation video interaction.

• Demographic data survey interaction.

• Clarifying device interaction with other brands.

These variables can be combined to identify specific users and adapt campaigns to improve the user experience with more relevant ads and optimised campaign performance.

“This tool allows us to implement all of this data,” Franco said. “The browser and device with which they connect to our content also informs the specific strategy we use.”

Targeting audience segments

For example, one targeted segment was people interested in traveling to Europe. The team added time and geographic location variables to detect people interested in trips to Europe, as well as those who were reading articles about European destinations and who had taken two trips in the past year.

“We could target these users and see how they interact with our content. Once we understood all of this, we had to think about how to serve content to them.”

They developed an audience pyramid to segment into four levels:

1. Mass audience (everyone).

2. Selected groups.

3. Exclusive audience.

4. Selected audience of influential leaders.

This helps them achieve increasingly precise and effective campaigns. For the most common audience segment — the mass users — any content can be applied. For the exclusive segments, Grupo Clarín serves specific, related content.

“As everything is variable, we analyse it all in real time. We wanted to have a whole array of creative solutions to impact these groups.”

Use of real-time data 

The real-time data is leveraged to:

• Show the right advertising to the right user while they’re reading a news story.

• Identify the ideal user for each campaign.

• Know if the right user is still interested in a campaign.

• Determine whether showing a campaign has a positive or negative impact.

When it comes to creativity, Franco said the sky is the limit. The team uses 3D and motion graphics, video, and interactive content, to name a few. “These creative assets are very powerful and bring a high level of interaction, capturing multiple audiences.”

The team also runs Fake Ads to gather even more data about the audience, with which they can help their advertising brands make better decisions.

“This tool not only helps us with our audience but also with our own creativity,” Franco added. “We have a team of geniuses who work on this.”

The team also realised  they needed dashboards to analyse all this data in real time. This enables Grupo Clarín to offer cutting-edge digital advertising with innovative formats and high-quality experiences that transform the interaction between brands and audiences.

“Of course there are things we have to adjust. With these systems in place, we can make much better decisions. We also created a virtual assistant to help us interpret the data. This VA is never tired and generates a large ecosystem. Everything now is based on the data.”

This has enabled Grupo Clarín to evolve into a new generation of publisher that:

• Understands there is always a new way to surprise audiences and the brands that choose to work with the news company.

• Has the tools to precisely understand and segment audiences.

• Knows who reads the brand and what they want.

• Create creative formats that integrate naturally with the content and increase the impact of each campaign.

• And, above all, the team believes there is always a new way to surprise audiences and the brands that trust the company.

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