With the emergence of Google and Facebook, the rules of the media game have changed. They introduced new audience and performance variables. A new paradigm was introduced in which advertising stopped being intuitive and became predictive and analytic.

In the midst of a global context where business cannot be overlooked, investments from advertisers began to take on a different direction, specifically more oriented towards performance. As a result, these new platforms capitalised the majority of the market, which in turn required traditional media to change their ways or risk being left out.

The decline in the number of readers who get their news from print media was added to these factors, as well as a shift in the number of people who consume free, digital media.

In the face of all these changes, what was a traditional media company supposed to do?

Ever since the implementation of Clarín’s paywall benefits programme, we have developed an exhaustive and personalised knowledge of our audience. We are constantly looking for new sources of monetisation, as well as optimising what we already have.

If advertisers are looking for audiences and individuals, we need to deliver— and with an improvement in the offers via precise segmentations that lead to enhanced performance and the generation of data-driven content for advertisers.

In the ad sales area, Clarín set out to lead in media inventory programmatic sales in Argentina. We have the best personalised, added-value offer. This allows us to build integral solutions that are tailored to the needs of advertisers.

That’s why we launched Brand Studio in 2018, which is where we generate data-driven content to leverage what we know about our audience, letting us find insights that help us offer an effective content strategy that’s set up with branding in mind and held up by performance.

How did we arrive at this integrated, synergistic approach?

First, we analysed different variables that we were already aware of with regards to our audience, such reading interests, geo-localisation, behaviour on social media, purchasing habits through the benefits programme — all with the goal of extracting insights that would help us determine what we needed to work on.

Then, we generated content for different platforms and devices. Once we distributed the content, we identified those users who showed interest by interacting with that content: those who read the articles, watched the videos, liked the posts.

Once the audience cluster had been formed and identified, we wanted to determine at which stage of the funnel each user was located in order to carry out new segmentations. A user who has read five articles, watched three videos, and liked three posts isn’t the same as one who’s only read the first part of one of the articles.

With these segmentations, we worked on a re-targeting strategy by which we defined different creative pieces for banners that we would run by audience (direct sales or programmatic) and multi-step emailing campaigns.

Today, we’re seeing the results of the innovations that we introduced at the newspaper, all of which motivates us to keep working on these changes. For Valentine’s Day 2019, we detected a search trend for “What to get a man for Valentine’s Day,” which is why we knew content about that topic would do well in terms of traffic or audience interaction.

Once we detected the insight, we had to find a partner who could capitalise on it. While searching for consumer habits in our benefits programme database, we detected that the benefits at beauty stores saw a jump in transactions around this date.

We had a match.

This meant we had a three-legged table, but still needed the key piece that would help make it all possible: an advertiser who would capitalise on Clarín’s platform. That’s how we got to sit down with our client Farmacity (a pharmacy chain within the retail and e-commerce sector) and get a proposal approved.

Now we had the perfect match.

We produced a content series based on the topic of “What to get a man for Valentine’s Day,” where we showcased products from the store that were on sale for this date. Once we identified the cluster of people who were interested, we sent an e-mail to users with a discount coupon that they could use on Farmacity’s e-commerce platform.

The traffic sources were Clarín.com’s homepage and social media, where we reached 1.5 million Facebook users in addition to the more than 100,000 users reading the articles, as well as the 10,000 e-mails sent to interested users. Sales jumped 27% in comparison to Valentine’s Day the prior year.

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