AUCKLAND, New Zealand—November 29, 2023— At AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com company, today announced that Television New Zealand (TVNZ), New Zealand’s state-owned, commercially funded television broadcaster, is the first media company in Aotearoa to adopt AWS Clean Rooms to transform the way it manages advertising. AWS Clean Rooms is an analytics service that helps companies across industries like advertising, media, and financial services more easily and securely collaborate on and analyze their combined customer datasets—without sharing or copying one another’s underlying data.
In the global media and entertainment industry, 71% of consumers expect personalized interactions. Data collected directly by a content provider about its viewers and audience, like viewership metrics, engagement data, and viewer preferences, becomes increasingly valuable to advertisers and critical to delivering a personalized viewing experience. Protecting the privacy of this data is paramount to TVNZ, and AWS Clean Rooms helps the broadcaster achieve this. With viewer consent, TVNZ collects audience viewership data, including show preferences and viewing trends, and collaborates with its advertising partners, such as McDonald’s and media company OMD, to analyze these anonymized collective datasets in a protected environment. This generates unique customer insights, for example, identifying the types of programs McDonald’s customers watch on the TVNZ+ mobile app. These insights help TVNZ and their advertisers improve their advertising and media strategy, helping to drive audience engagement and more personalized advertising and loyalty programs.
TVNZ also uses Amazon Personalize, a machine learning (ML) service that enables companies to create real-time personalized user experiences faster at scale, to recommend content based on individual viewing behaviors. For example, a viewer who watches a rugby documentary may receive recommendations to watch other sports shows or shows that are popular with other sports viewers.
“If you want viewers to pay attention to your ads, you must show them personalized offers that resonate with their needs,” said Rob Hutchinson, general manager of Digital, Commercial at TVNZ. “AWS Clean Rooms enables us to do this by working with our advertisers to deliver personalization while protecting customer data. Our advertising partners can set up AWS Clean Rooms at low cost in just a few minutes, creating an environment for us to collaborate and analyze data securely to drive innovations that excite our audiences. We’re mindful of our requirements in this area, and we’re excited to be offering innovation while working in a future-fit and privacy-centric way.”
TVNZ’s AWS solution gave us a new opportunity to provide a solution to the ongoing challenge of being able to anonymize and deploy McDonald’s first party data across advertising channels,” said Jen Hilliar, Business Director at OMD, New Zealand. “Analyzing our collective data safely and effectively in the cloud helped us deliver more personalized and relevant ads to users. Both McDonald’s and OMD are excited to be part of this first-to-market opportunity, and we look forward to achieving more advertising campaign goals together, paving the way for retaining McDonald’s valued data in a safe environment.”
TVNZ worked with AWS Advanced Consulting Partner Slalom, a global technology consulting company, to implement AWS Clean Rooms. In just six weeks, Slalom understood the broadcaster’s requirements and deployed AWS Clean Rooms to enable TVNZ and its advertisers to deliver personalized content more securely and cost-effectively. Key to this was the ability to share data in a secure and modern data exchange environment that meets TVNZ’s robust data governance and privacy policy, which prevents the broadcaster from accessing advertisers’ private consumer data.
“Advertisers are searching for ways to personalize engagement with consumers, and the solution we’ve built for TVNZ using AWS Clean Rooms provides this,” said Rio Longacre, global lead for Advertising and Marketing Transformation at Slalom. “This six-week project was a fantastic experience for our team, and we are proud to be working with TVNZ and AWS to bring personalized advertising to the New Zealand market. So many global brands have signed up as advertisers for the pilot, demonstrating the incredible opportunity for broadcasters, like TVNZ, to be a leader in this space.”
“Broadcasters globally have been using the cloud and data analytics to deliver fresh content and a more personalized viewing experience,” said Tiffany Bloomquist, country manager of Commercial Sector at AWS New Zealand. “TVNZ is the first media company in New Zealand to benefit from the secure data-collaboration capabilities that AWS Clean Rooms delivers, making data analysis easy and transparent, driving advertising success without compromising data protection.”
About Amazon Web Services in New Zealand
AWS has a long-term commitment to customers and local communities in Aotearoa New Zealand, investing in infrastructure and digital skills for customers and partners since it first started local operations in 2013. AWS plans to invest NZ $7.5 billion to open an AWS Asia Pacific (Auckland) Region, which is estimated to create 1,000 new jobs and contribute $10.8 billion to the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) over the next 15 years.
About Amazon Web Services
Since 2006, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud. AWS has been continually expanding its services to support virtually any workload, and it now has more than 240 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 102 Availability Zones within 32 geographic regions, with announced plans for 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in Canada, Germany, Malaysia, New Zealand, and Thailand. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.