Two developments in a week are set to change the way digital advertising works in Australia, with Fairfax Media partnering both arch-rival News Corp and Google.

The first of these is only formative, with Fairfax, News and Nine Entertainment signing a memorandum of understanding to explore an Australian anonymised digital identity exchange.

This would combine their respective identity assets and allow advertisers a further step in targetting authenticated audiences across all three publishing groups.

Fairfax and Nine have already partnered in the APEX digital advertising exchange, but its lack of publisher breadth has barred it from taking off to the same extent as New Zealand's KPEX, in which Fairfax partners local rival NZME among others.

The need to unite to provide advertisers with an alternative to the Google-Facebook duopoly has already driven competitors in the Asia Pacific - notably Singapore, Indonesia and most-recently Malaysia - to get together in their own exchanges.

Chris Janz - who is driving both developments for Fairfax, of which he is managing director of Australian metro publishing - put the onus on publishers in an address to WAN-Ifra's Digital Media Asia conference in Singapore in late October. It was "up to publishers to change the conversation" to enable advertisers to trade automatically with them and buy premium inventory, he said.

Even in that context, the latest development - Janz' announcement that Fairfax will let Google book advertisements on its top websites including smh.com.au, the.age.com.au and afr.com - is groundbreaking, as it becomes the first traditional media company to form an advertising partnership with the search giant.

Janz says the partnership is about playing to the respective strengths of Fairfax Google, and not "trying to be everything to everyone". The hope is that Fairfax will gain from Google's scale and automated booking expertise.

The latest development sees Fairfax joined by News Corp and APEX partner Nine in a proposed co-operative to extend addressable marketing across the country's biggest publishers. Planning and consultation is underway with a view to a launch in the first half of next year.

News Corp chief digital officer Nicole Sheffield says it is up to content creators to ensure their "audiences, data, content and now identity" are properly harnessed for marketers by Australians. Nine chief sales officer Michael Stephenson says the combination of Australian publishers "will offer a real alternative to the global players" for advertisers and agency partners. News has also announced plans to share data with its realestate.com.au property site which will augment its own audience information with data from its six million users.

The anonymised identity issue gives advertisers who want to target specific people and serve different advertisements or a second viewing, an alternative to cookies. Janz says the initiative would streamline how marketers can leverage data from content publishers.

Pictured: Chris Janz, Nicole Sheffield and Michael Stephenson celebrate the identity partnership