Future offers clients first party data on 300m readers

Future, the global media group behind brands Marie Claire, Homes & Gardens, Country Life, Total Guitar and Four Four Two, has become the latest publishing giant to launch an audience data platform, giving advertisers access to its first-party data, captured across its portfolio of brands.

Dubbed Aperture, it is claimed the platform gives advertisers a transparent, privacy compliant and future-proof solution, with access to audience segments and new targeting capabilities across more than 180 of Future’s digital brands.

A recent report commissioned from Forrester predicted that publishers would increasingly work cheek by jowl with brand owners in an effort to ensure brands have compliant data for their marketing activities.

It insisted that publishers’ first-party data will be the new media currency in the future of digital marketing as a privacy-safe foundation for brands to continue targeting consumers – without identifying and tracking them across domains.

Future says the platform will house data from more than 300 million monthly global users to inform advanced segmentation.

Engineered to operate as a single, unified solution to bring online audiences to advertisers in real-time, Aperture is said to enable unparalleled access to billions of monthly ad impressions and delivers targeted audiences across interests, behaviours, geographies, lifestyles and much more, with no impact from any potential changes to cookie use.

Aperture has also increased Future’s addressable audience by 150% and empowers the delivery of audiences in-session, a vital characteristic to ensure campaign effectiveness around critical advertising milestones, such as Black Friday, where demand for inventory is high, Future maintains.

The company has has also built proprietary price comparison technology for products and services, in a move designed to help provide the best price for consumers on their path to purchase.

This data, along with details of intent-based shopping captured through Future’s HAWK ecommerce technology, will inform Aperture with behavioural signals.

In addition, Aperture intakes thousands of demographic signals from across the Future ecosystem each day and combines them with a robust email subscriber database to further identify and target audiences.

Future cites one current campaign running on the platform has shown a 66% higher click-through rate (CTR) than using broad targeting techniques, showcasing the demonstrable impact high quality, first-party audience data and precision targeting has on campaign performance.

Future global commercial operations director Nick Flood said: “We have created a world class first-party data solution for our partners, so they can remain confident that, no matter their needs, Future can reach their audiences at scale and with high efficacy.

“We believe the data opportunity we offer is unique within premium publishers and, with additional functionality set to be announced shortly, will be the best in class option for advertisers.

“Clients have already applied Aperture to their campaigns with fantastic results and we’re looking forward to seeing the platform flourish as we onboard more high value and unique data-sets.”

Future first started is building a 360-degree profile of its customers and embracing artificial intelligence in 2018, when it implemented the Selligent Marketing Cloud platform, as part of plans to deliver customised and personal marketing across website, email and mobile platforms.