Unify needed a data partner that could bring together 20+ media brands, across geographies and content.
Unify is the result of an M&A by TF1 creating three core areas of the business: publishers, brand solutions and services, and social e-commerce. For the publishing arm of the business, the M&A process created the need for a platform to aggregate all of the data in the group, not just media or behavioural data but email and semantic data too. The aim was to make Unify exist as one company by bringing data into one platform.
Unify needed an Audience Platform to support its core needs of insight, analytics, and complete reach of all its audiences across browsers. The publisher set out to find a new data platform to handle large volumes and diverse data and a partner with the technical ability and tools to serve the group’s needs.
Building a data platform from the ground up
The Unify team were building a strategy from scratch due to the recent M&A, so they needed a partner with a strong customer success offering. “It was essential for us to have people that we can rely on, that know how to handle the tech and the kind of complexity that we have…it’s fine to deploy a DMP as a piece of JavaScript on a website, but we had to do it on 20 websites and more than five apps. We acquired the confidence, during the RFP process that the Permutive team would be able to handle this kind of complexity,” says Dounia Zouine, Group Chief Data & Digital Officer at Unify Group.
Unify aimed for 100% cookie-less advertising after realising third-party cookies were being blocked in Safari and Firefox. “We were looking for a reliable cookieless technology, and because we were launching activity for growth, we realised we couldn’t grow because we were not able to address 100% of our audiences,” adds Zouine. “We were very happy to be able to provide proof that we were already well engaged in a cookieless roadmap.”