Advertisers have been grappling with the changing eco-system surrounding identifiers and specifically 3rd party cookies for several years now. The writing is clearly on the wall and with Google's latest announcements we know that addressability in advertising has shifted profoundly. After a period of information gathering, analysis and reflection advertisers, supported by their agencies, are now moving forward with their future strategies and leveraging 1st party data is fixed to the centre for many.
Of media bought across addressable channels, think search, social, programmatic & CTV, Dentsu see less than 4% being informed by 1st party data. More acutely GroupM and Publicis put the proportion at 3% and 2% respectively. Whilst the statistics are revealing, the agency groups are focussed on working to bring about the necessary change. The narrative amongst advertisers and agency strategist & account teams is consistent, 2024 is the year that 1st party data takes centre stage on the media plan.
Bringing 1st party customer data to media has been fraught with challenges but the the path is clearing across the four main battlegrounds. In each case the industry has evolved to satisfy the enterprise requirements of advertisers, enabling them to move forward with their 1st party data strategies:
- Data Security - Information security is a priority for all businesses considering leveraging their customer data. There are now established methodologies for hashing and irreversibly encrypting data sets for use in advertising platforms such as Google, Meta and others. These approaches results in advertisers being able to share customer segments with DSPs without any personally identifiable information (PII) leaving their environment
- Data Privacy - Consumer activism and regulation in the shape of GDPR & CCPA have fundamentally altered the rights and responsibilities surrounding the use of customer data. Being able to maintain segment lists with up-to-date consents and permissions has moved to being an essential requirement for enterprises to maintain compliance, the ability to add and remove users on-demand unlocks the governance necessary. Further, capabilities which keep 1st party data '1st party' are allowing the advertiser to remain the only 'data processor', concentrating governance and transparency with the data owner, the brand themselves
- Timelines for technology & data transformation - Historically advertisers have needed to copy and move their customer data out of their enterprise environments and migrate it into 3rd party platforms, think CDPs or DSPs. In a historic role reversal it is now possible to bring applications into an advertisers enterprise architecture, leveraging an application layer, natively within their chosen cloud environment such as Azure, AWS or GCP and datawarehouses & datalakes such as Snowflake, BigQuery & Databricks - Implementation times have been reduced to under 3 week and value being avaiable 'in-quarter'
- Alignment between advertiser and agency teams - Partnership across the agency space has opened up massive commonality in thinking, strategy and execution allowing an advertiser's media buy to benefit from their 1st party data in a seamless and singularly value accretive manner.
2024 is the year that 1st party data for media enters the 'new normal' lexicon and AUDIENCES couldn't be more excited to be at the centre of the shift. Congratulations to Dentsu, GroupM and Publicis for partnering in this industry changing initiative - Let's accelerate activation of 1st party data in media together!
Leading advertisers are already using AUDIENCES to accelerate activation of 1st party data across advertising with zero compromise to privacy or security.
Contact AUDIENCES to discuss how to accelerate activation of your 1st party data.
