First-party data is the new oil of the ad economy- CMO
By Zion Rufus
Amid the proposed deprecation of third party cookies, much attention has now been placed on first-party data.
To the dismay of digital marketers and publishers, the past few years have seen an increased focus on user privacy across all platforms, especially from customers, and regulatory bodies as Google’s phasing out of third party cookies, announced in 2020 and scheduled to take effect in 2023, became a cause for worry for digital marketers and advertisers who relied on third party data for their ad tracking and targeting.
“We’ve had well over a year to think about how our lives as marketers will change once Google sunsets third-party data tracking,” said Jory Jes Jardins, CMO, Countable.
Today, as the ad world begins to count down to the no third-party cookies era, first-party data has become the go-to for marketers and advertisers.
“We didn’t have much of a choice,” Jardin continued. “The public has awakened to their unwitting exchange of data for personalized digital services. Even a whiff of un-permissioned data sharing causes consumer backlash, as it did for WhatsApp when the messaging service announced a change in its terms of service for business users in January 2021, sending nearly 9M users to encrypted competitor Signal.”
“Brand advertisers have gotten the message: back away from third-party ad tracking and focus instead on data directly provided by users that the brand owns, or first-party data. If we agree that first-party data is the new oil of the ad economy, how do we obtain it?”
Buttressing trust as the solution, Jardin opined that the digital ad industry needs to stop thinking of how to re-engineer, or clone, trust and simply re-earn it. To achieve that, she stated: “We have to understand what trust — or New Trust — looks like in the Post-Cookie Era, and what does the New Trust look like? It’s privacy-first with good intentions.”
According to Jardin, the New Trust is GDPR compliant and based on first- or zero-party data. The CMO explained that trust in tech alone is impossible if it’s not infused with ethical intentions toward privacy, which means baking consumer content into all data-driven business processes.
She said: “For now, the bar is to be transparent about the purpose of data collection while being consumer-friendly, agile, and secure.”
First party data is the data that is collected by companies directly from the consumer. Such as website visits, survey data, email clicks, social media conversations and more, advertisers have long been collecting first-party data.
This data also includes information such as intent to purchase, browsing behaviour, transaction history, loyalty, and preferences such as from surveys, and competitions.
Hence, in the wake of Google and Apple no longer allowing advertisers to follow users across the web with browser cookies, advertisers are once again returning to first-party data as their first choice for ad targeting.
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