The insights and nuggets of intelligence gleaned from user data can be leveraged to grow advertising revenue, opening doors with compelling conversations.

INMA Advertising Initiative Lead Gabriel Dorosz said this doesn’t just mean logged-in data, but can include any kind of data that can be useful for selling advertising.

That covers a broad range of signals, including explicit information such as newsletter registrations or event sign-ups, behavioural data on content consumption, contextual data around topics and interests, and demographic and geographic information. Even attention measurement and inventory scoring, he noted, can “provide a signal to buyers that your inventory is valuable.”

At the INMA Master Class on First-Party Data Activation for Advertising, media leaders from The New York Times, Business Insider, Times Internet, and Mediahuis Ireland shared how their companies are leveraging AI targeting and commerce signal integration to unlock new data-powered products and revenue.

The New York Times mines Wirecutter data

At a time when many brands are just beginning to explore how to leverage first-party data, The New York Times is leaning into the first-party data ecosystem that it has been quietly building for nearly a decade.

Valerio Poce, head of advertising product strategy at The Times, outlined how the company is leveraging commerce-like signals by mining Wirecutter, its product-recommendation Web site, for insights.

Although purchases don’t happen on Wirecutter itself, the site drove nearly US$1 billion in gross merchandise value through affiliate links last year, and its audience is growing dramatically.

“We realised … people are not buying things there, but they’re researching, they’re clicking, they’re going to affiliate sites where they can complete the purchase,” Poce said. “So what can we do with that kind of first-party data that we previously didn’t have?”

That led to the creation of Wirecutter researchers — audiences of people actively researching specific products or categories. Brands in those categories can target these readers, effectively tapping into mid-funnel intent signals akin to retail media.

“This is very much a vertical approach, but on average, click rates using Wirecutter researchers are 55% higher than average across all of our targeting solutions. So it’s definitely working for specific categories,” Poce said.

Business Insider’s reACT solution

Erin Hennessy, vice president of ad product innovation at Business Insider, said she and her team use targeting progress products as a clear way of leveraging first-party data during a live campaign, with other opportunities to do mid reads and optimisations towards what's working.

That includes lots of conversations with the clients, as well as a readiness to be able to pivot and make shifts.

SÁGA is the external umbrella brand for Business Insider’s first-party data activations with advertisers. reACT was a new solution, and they used it to leverage advanced prompt engineering through open AI.

Using this large language model coupled with zero-party data to compile real user responses to how they are reacting to the content — both emotionally and cognitively.

“That that kind of peering has unlocked targeting, a targeting opportunity for us, as well as new insights about our content and what's resonating with audiences,” Hennessy said.

The team utilises about 15 user reactions that can be used for retargeting. Some of the strongest ones are those that connect back to the Business Insider mission and focus on B2B advertisers. These insights turn a simple conversation into something much more tactical that a brand can lean into.

“I went into this build assuming that all of these other emotional reactions would actually be as successful at BI as they maybe were at The New York Times,” Hennessy said.

For example, love is an emotion, and was one of the top emotions for driving performance and revenue for the Times. For Business Insider, however, love was not an emotional driver that advertisers cared about

“We're really targeting these B2B advertisers, and that was really our sweet spot,” Hennessy explained. “The four here, plus others, are working well for us in terms of driving deals.”

Times Internet’s Times AdTalk chatbot

Abhishek Nigam, business head of Times Internet’s adtech platform Colombia, discussed the company’s Times AdTalk product. When a user clicks an as, a chatbot opens. This chatbot is fine-tuned to content shared by the client and enables a freeflow conversation between a user and a brand.

“So this creates another level of engagement between the brand and the user and it also allows for a lot of insights and information to be shared because once you have the chat, you can figure out what kinds of questions are being asked, what kind of interests exist, and what are the different features or solutions that the end user is looking forward to,” Nigam said.

“These kinds of solutions create the next level of engagement with the end user. They also allow the brands to have the insights that can be shared, that can be looked into, and plan for the next campaign or the next strategy that they want to go ahead with.”

Adtech is at an inflection point right now, and the industry is reinventing itself. With issues around cookies, privacy, eroding margins, it is becoming challenging for the publishing ecosystem to see how they will create sustainability.

At this inflection point, AI solutions are helping solve these aspects, Nigam said: “Once we have these applications in place, it helps us create a growth engine and a long-term mode for the publishing ecosystem.”

Mediahuis Ireland’s InMarket and ReClick products

Mediahuis Ireland is able to build powerful audiences and products for its advertising customers because of its strong content and relationship with its users, Connor Diamond, head of data insights at Mediahuis, said.

“What we’ve learned on our journey is that buyers are concerned with the ability to scale first-party data,” Diamond said. “They’re also concerned about the quality and consistency of that data.”

One issue that impacts scalability is the publisher’s ability to keep the user logged in so they can be targeted, he added. That data can be layered with contextual and/or behavioural targeting.

In 2024 the team rolled out innovative new products such as InMarket and ReClick, which won INMA Silver for Best Idea to Grow Advertising Sales in 2025.

ReClick is the core of Mediahuis Ireland’s retargeting revolution. The linkage between log files and Piano allows the organisation to track users’ previous engagement, interactions with advertising formats and paid content.

“This helps us activate previously interested users for specific sectors or categories,” Diamond said. “This helps us support our overarching Privacy First commercial audience strategy.”

InMarket captures user-declared intent through interactive polls that are embedded in display ads. This allows advertising clients to target very high-value audiences.

The poll is kept very simple, just one question with two available responses. The responses are captured through Piano, which helps with segmentation and retargeting.

“The important thing for this product was to maximise the number of responses that we get,” Diamond said. “Being able to serve that pool through display advertising, instead of serving it embedded in an article which might only get a finite amount of readers, helps us. The more responses we can get, the more robust the model audiences that we can build for advertisers.”

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