It was great to see a strong turnout from the IAB community at the recent iMedia Future of Marketing Summit, where Trade Me and Stuff took the stage together to make a case that's worth sitting with in the AI era: the difference between inferred and real intent signals. The advantage, they argued, sits with the Kiwi publishers and platforms holding real first-party behavioural data at scale - and increasingly, with what happens when those platforms start working together.
Authors: Ivan Fuyala Head of Ads, Trade Me and John Buckley, Director of Digital Revenue & Strategy, Stuff Digital
As AI reshapes how marketers plan and target, the conversation was simple: a model's confidence isn't the same as genuine audience intent. Real Kiwi behavioural data - what people actually read, search and do - is getting harder to find at scale. Trade Me and Stuff have it, and now they're bringing to life what it looks like combined. Individually, each brings something advertisers can't get from global platforms.
Stuff's 2.2 million visitors sit across 20+ behavioural cohorts - from "Money Movers and Shakers" to "Household Value Shoppers" - built from real content and research, not modelled guesses. The new Stuff Health vertical pulled 500,000 unique visitors in its first month, and Stuff Wealth research found 52% of "not yet prepared" first-home buyers are already reading Stuff daily - ripe for the picking.
Trade Me's 3.8 million opted-in CDP members generate listings-and-search intent data across 5,000+ categories — the kind that surfaces shifts before they show up obviously anywhere else. Think EV interest accelerating fastest in rural, ute-driving regions, or property searches flagging demand for insurance, power and broadband months before the move happens.
Put together, it's a joint media and data partnership spanning content behaviour and transactional intent - planned as one conversation, rather than two separate buys. A property mover on Trade Me reading content is a single, richer audience for a bank or insurer. An EV searcher engaging with Stuff's motoring content is one signal, not two disconnected ones. And it's all happening in an environment marketers can actually trust: 92%+ of users rate ads on Trade Me and local news sites as neutral-to-trustworthy, against 61% for leading social platforms.
"Trade Me and Stuff together can show you what real Kiwis are actually doing, right now, at scale — and give you one ecosystem to act on it," says Ivan Fuyala, Head of Ads at Trade Me.
"This isn't just two data sets sitting side by side. It's a combined view of intent and context that lets us build for a brief, not just fill a booking," adds John Buckley, Director of Digital Revenue and Strategy at Stuff Digital.
Their challenge to the room at iMedia Future of Marketing Summit was straightforward: ask what combined publisher data reveals about your category, share the business problem instead of the brief, and test a hypothesis with your local publisher partner.