In today’s post-cookie world, marketers are facing an identity crisis. But the solution might be hiding in plain sight!
The Day That Marketers Dream Of (but struggle to realise)
Confession: I’ve got an embarrassing habit.
Don’t judge me, but the first thing I do when I wake up is scroll through the Daily Mail for overnight gossip in bed!
Still burdened by New Year’s resolution guilt, I hit the gym, earbuds in, podcast on (I’m on the one about the crazy ‘mushroom’ lady at the moment).
On the way to work, I hop on the T8 line and pass a few billboards along the way. When I head into the Blis office, someone inevitably has a “House Hits” playlist running on Spotify. I’ll probably have a few meetings to head to around Surry Hills, and the Uber driver’s usually listening to the radio. On the way home, it’s back to the podcast, before settling in with the wife for a bit of MAFS in the evening.
For marketers, what’s great about my day is pretty much all of it is addressable: across mobile, audio, dOOH, CTV, and more. The downside? Good luck trying to tie all those moments together using identifiers. It’s nearly impossible to connect everything into one coherent language of attention and outcomes.
And that’s not the only challenge…
The Identity Crisis in Advertising
As privacy regulations tighten and identifiers continue to fade, we can be forgiven for thinking we are losing our grip on precision targeting. But just because identifiers are reducing, doesn’t mean marketing effectiveness has to go with them.
Marketers have never had more metrics and means to measure attention: impressions, clicks, video views, engagements. But the gap between exposure and outcome persists. Especially in categories like FMCG and retail, where purchases often happen offline, proving media impact on real-world behavior remains tough.
From Eyeballs to Outcomes
Today’s challenge isn’t just about reaching people, it’s about reaching the right people, in the right moments, and proving the campaign drove results. On top of all that, we have to do it all in a privacy-first way!
So what’s the missing link between attention and action?
It might be more consistent, more ubiquitous and more visible, than we think.
Everyone Is Somewhere: Why Geography Is Key
Everyone shops somewhere. Lives somewhere. Moves, eats, and works somewhere. Everything happens somewhere. And that “somewhere” always has a postcode.
Postcodes may seem simple, but they’re among the most powerful and privacy-safe signals in modern marketing.
It doesn’t reveal your name or identity like personal identifiers do. But it does reveal context, intent, and behaviour.
What better signals I am into fitness, my online behaviour, or the fact I’m physically at a gym five times a week (OK, two times in reality, but I swear I’ll get to five by the end of the year!). All gyms, homes, cafes, offices, and events share a common feature: they exist in physical places, all mapped to a postcode.
Geography: The Privacy-Safe Connector
Postcode-level data offers marketers a rare and valuable balance:
It’s privacy-first: No cookies or personal identifiers required.
- It’s privacy-first: No cookies or personal identifiers required.
- It’s predictive: Revealing patterns of behavior and likely intent.
- It’s integrative: Enabling multiple datasets to work together seamlessly
Think of it as a Rosetta Stone for modern media: a shared language that lets advertisers connect disparate signals across channels and platforms.
Let’s go back to my day for a moment. I wake up every morning in Kingsgrove (2208). My gym is in Earlwood (2206). I travel through various postcodes on the T8 Line. My office is in 2016 (Eveleigh), and I’ve got client meetings in Surry Hills (2010).
Each of these moments is tied to a place. And from a planning and measurement perspective, postcode is all you need: no email address, no demographic profile, no tracking ID. Just a signal grounded in real-world behaviour.
Real-World Integration: Connecting the Dots
This is how Blis combines our geo-behavioural intelligence with other rich datasets that also speak the same language: postcodes. And the result is better targeting all within a privacy first framework:
- ABS Census data gives us access to demographic, socio-economic, and geographic insights that help us understand the makeup, lifestyle, and behaviours of communities at a postcode level.
- Circana provides postcode-level ProScores that show where specific product categories are growing or losing momentum.
- Mastercard’s aggregated and anonymised spending insights offer retail data analytics and trends across various sectors and geographies. This deterministic, GDPR and CCPA-compliant source opens up sales uplift measurement opportunities.
Together, these datasets help marketers plan around intent-rich moments in high-opportunity areas, and reach audiences with precision, minus the privacy risk.
It also opens up measurement opportunities: Blis technology can hold out selected postcodes from activation, and then compare real-world results in these areas to ones that actually saw ads, and subsequently measure the uplift, for almost any metric that speaks to the same geographic taxonomy!
Use Case: Reaching fashionistas in a brand refresh (and measuring the result!)
A fashion brand’s internal research study has identified the demographic and lifestyle traits of an ideal audience that would be the perfect target for a brand refresh. The same study also revealed their preferred retailers:
- Blis behavioural insights would identify postcodes with a strong incidence of visitation to these preferred retailers
- ABS Data and Mastercard insights – would further refine this postcode list using demographic and spend traits uncovered by the study
- Blis activates an omnichannel campaign, targeting those postcodes across mobile, CTV, audio, and digital OOH with tailored creative. We can then use our Smart Holdout Groups technology, to ‘holdout’ postcodes for measurement.
- Blis, together with Mastercard can then measure sales uplift by comparing aggregated and anonymised spending insights from exposed postcodes, compared to control postcodes.
Measurement That Matters
It is possible to measure real-world outcomes and it’s geography that is the key connector:
The Blis platform enables full-funnel measurement across key performance metrics:
- Footfall uplift
- Brand lift
- Incremental sales
All of this, without relying on cookies or invasive tracking technologies.
Why This Matters Now
We believe geography is having a renaissance.
In a world where identifiers are disappearing and consumers (and governments!) expect privacy, postcode-level intelligence offers marketers a way to be relevant, effective, and respectful all at once.
It doesn’t just help you find your audience. It helps you understand where they are, when to reach them, and why they’re worth engaging. And critically, it also helps you to finally measure whether your strategy actually worked, across any channel.
Curious how postcode-powered planning could work for your next campaign?
Reach out to our team to start turning real-world signals into real-world results.