First-party data is the seed for industry growth

Editor’s note: Elizabeth Brennan is head of advertiser strategy at U.K-based audience platform Permutive.

Cookie confusion is currently reverberating across the advertising industry as brands and publishers evaluate the risk of digital advertising becoming unaddressable. The advertising industry has become so focused on talking about the technology that it sometimes forgets to look at the macro issues. Digital advertising is fueled by third-party data, and this has come at the cost of user privacy. The risk is great for brands that don’t focus on this. 

Advertisers who want to future-proof their businesses have a decision ahead of them. Continue to track users across the web using third-party data? Or start building your first-party data strategy?

Shifting the entire advertising industry to be “privacy-safe,” particularly when it comes to targeting, will take time. For advertisers, a crucial step is getting closer to first-party data owners and understanding where to find their desired audiences at scale.  

Uncover audience insights 

A positive in all the chaos surrounding browser updates and legislation is that publishers have shifted their businesses away from third-party cookies since Apple and Mozilla blocked them in Safari and Firefox. 

Most publishers globally have been building their first-party data strategy for a while. Insider, for example, launched its first-party data platform SAGA in February 2020. The publisher has seen 400% growth year-over-year, and today 19 out of its top 20 advertisers are using the platform. They have been able to find audiences for their advertisers that no one else can because they have built a deep relationship with their users, and the insights they can provide are built with first-party data.  

This data includes many privacy-safe data signals such as reading habits, ad engagement and content interaction. It also provides unique insights and audience nuances that advertisers might not know about their target audiences. It allows for a better advertising experience for readers and consumers. 

Publishers can offer advertisers the keys to better audience understanding and richer targeting in a privacy-first world, providing them with the tools they need to address their audience without compromising consumer privacy and losing their trust.

Data strategies that prioritize relationships

A study by ISBA into transparency in the programmatic supply chain found that 15 advertisers had nearly 300 distinct supply chains to reach 12 publishers. It’s a symptom of a complex system, with multiple parties looking for maximum value without considering how this impacts consumers. 

Building trust is core to building a strong first-party data strategy. Publishers have always owned the relationship with their users. The information provided by each user – which comes in exchange for an improved on-site experience – is valuable, personal and privileged. Previously, data was so freely available through third-party data that it allowed ad tech companies to build huge data businesses, which came with a wealth of problems. 

Consumers were faced with a poor user experience, and publishers that generated the content had little control over their data. This meant all of the advertising decision-making and optimization became transactional rather than strategic. In turn, this had a significant impact on the relationship between publishers and advertisers. But this is now changing for the better. 

As the industry steps away from third-party data, it’s reverting to how advertising used to work pre-cookies – closer relationships between advertisers, publishers and the end-user.  

Privacy-safe advertising 

In this new cookie-free world, the balance of power has the potential to be fairer. Publishers, who have a relationship with their users and their customers, will be responsible for providing privacy-safe advertising to fund the open web. This will all happen without tracking users across the internet and via the relationships between the publisher and advertiser, i.e., the data controllers and ad-tech will act solely as the enabler; it will not play a part in the data collection or decision-making. 

In this way, digital marketers will be able to plan and reach their audiences using the data that publishers own without relying on data that is deprecating and identifying individuals. 

The new cookie-free landscape will return the power to publishers, meaning that it is crucial that brands build closer and stronger relationships with their publisher partners to take advantage of this. These relationships will be crucial for the effective buying of digital advertising across the web in a privacy-safe way.