With tech giants and major retailers moving into Australia’s billion-dollar retail media space, News Corp is looking for a share of their business.

And at trade publication Mumbrella’s Retail Marketing Summit last week, Pippa Leary told industry representatives how they planned to do it.

Thee quarters of the retail media space is currently dominated by Amazon, Coles, and Woolworths, with airlines, banks and other retailers such as Chemist Warehouse and Wesfarmers taking a share.

And although broadcaster Nine Entertainment – which owns the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and the Australian Financial Review – is developing its own retail media solution, News Corp would be the first publishing-dominated player.

Leary, who is NCA’s managing director of client product, said News had been “on our own retail journey” in recent years, transforming itself from a billboard – in which it just showed ads to audiences on behalf of clients – into an integrated shopfront in which it also sold products to them, on behalf of retailers.

“We have sought to expand our coverage of the retail marketing funnel, and the next increasingly important step down the funnel is the retail media environment,” she said.

The development will involve using its own first-party data to identify high-intent audiences as they hit the network, and creating content specifically aimed at moving those audiences through the purchase funnel.

News Corp’s Intent Connect insights platform now collects about two billion first-person data points each month. “We’re now in the unique position to meaningfully help retailers build new advertising revenue streams as they embark on their own retail media journey,” she said.

News helps its advertisers acquire new customers “at scale” by identifying high-intent audiences, intercept their shopping journey with ads across its network. It then puts an advertisers’ products in its ‘high-intent’ environments.

“It’s like having a magic lens that shows you shoppers ready to spend,” she said.

Leary said News had been preparing for the ending of third-party cookies for five years, “making sure we can still reach all these potential buyers without missing a beat”.

With what she says is one of Australia’s largest first-person data ecosystems tied to “persistent identities”, no data will be lost with third-party cookies. Partnering with LiveRamp, InfoSum, Salesforce and Adobe will enable News to deliver “market-agnostic opportunities” to match customer databases to its 17 million monthly users in a way she says is “completely privacy compliant”.

“In essence, we keep filling the top of your retail media funnel, but with customers who are more likely to buy,” she added.

Connecting with potential buyers “when they are making decisions” to direct their spending towards your business was “exactly what News Corp Australia does better than anyone else.

“When you use what we call commerce content – strategically positioned content that reviews and talks about the benefits of your product by trusted third parties – we are able to deliver more customers, more transactions and more opportunities for you to amplify the brands you work with.”