Privacy and performance: it's time to rethink how we activate data

Following my presentation at IAB UK's Performance Without Compromise event, I wanted to share why I believe the next chapter of audience activation is about much more than brands making better use of their first-party data. It's about unlocking commercial value for everyone who owns valuable audience intelligence.

By Molly Peake, Chief Customer Officer, AUDIENCES

Last week, I had the pleasure of speaking at IAB UK's Performance Without Compromise event, exploring a challenge that sits at the heart of what we're building at AUDIENCES: how can businesses unlock the full commercial potential of their data without compromising privacy, governance or control?

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It's a question that has become increasingly important as brands, publishers and data owners invest in richer customer intelligence and more sophisticated cloud infrastructure. Yet much of the technology we rely on to activate that intelligence was built for a very different era. For years, activating customer data has meant moving it. Copying it between platforms, matching it through intermediaries and creating multiple versions of valuable data before it can influence advertising. Every additional step introduces cost, complexity and another point at which businesses lose direct control. And despite all that infrastructure, we're still not particularly good at putting the data we already have to work.

We don't have a data problem. We have an activation problem. These were my opening remarks. One of the figures I shared to reinforce this was that less than 3% of media spend is informed by first-party data. That’s the point that people take notice of. How can it be that low? Brands have spent years building customer databases, loyalty programmes and modern cloud infrastructure. They know who their customers are, what they've purchased, who's lapsed and who's most valuable, yet so much media investment continues to happen without using that intelligence.

We're still seeing brands spend money acquiring customers they already have, missing opportunities to re-engage valuable audiences and failing to connect marketing investment to the customer relationships they've worked so hard to build.

This was precisely the problem AUDIENCES was founded to solve. How can we close the gap.

Our founder, Rob McLaughlin, experienced these challenges firsthand while leading data at organisations including Sky and Barclays. He recognised that the traditional model of moving customer data into yet another platform was fundamentally at odds with the governance and control businesses needed. So we approached the problem differently: move the technology, not the data. By deploying AUDIENCES directly within a customer's existing cloud environment, we enable businesses to build, govern and activate audiences while retaining control of their underlying data.

But the question that really matters is whether doing things differently delivers better business outcomes. What if greater control actually delivered better performance? When we started working with brands, we wanted to prove that privacy-first activation wasn't simply a better way to manage data. It could also deliver better marketing performance.

Could brands acquire customers more efficiently? Could they stop wasting the budget on existing customers? Could they identify new opportunities for growth and make their media investment work harder?

The results have been incredibly encouraging.

Across our customer work, we've seen an average increase of 22% increase in return on ad spend. Our work with Pets at Home was also recognised with Gold for Best Use of Data & Audiences at the 2026 Performance Marketing Awards.

For me, working closely with our customers, this is what makes the technology exciting. It's not simply about activating another audience segment. It's about giving marketing teams the ability to make more informed decisions and demonstrate the commercial value of their customer intelligence. And as we've developed the platform, we've recognised that this opportunity extends far beyond brands.

Brands were only the beginning

One of the most important points I wanted to explore at IAB UK was how the same infrastructure can create value for businesses across the advertising ecosystem. Publishers, for example, have incredibly rich first-party data. They understand their audiences through the content they consume, their interests, behaviours and relationships with their environments. But how much of that intelligence is being translated into commercial value?

For publishers, the opportunity isn't necessarily about reducing acquisition costs. It's about making their audience intelligence more accessible to advertisers, creating new demand and generating incremental revenue beyond their existing inventory.

By building and governing audience signals within their own environments, publishers can connect that intelligence into the wider advertising ecosystem, including platforms such as The Trade Desk and Index Exchange, while retaining control of their data.

The same principle applies to data owners and providers, whose business models depend on making valuable intelligence accessible to customers. Historically, expanding distribution has often meant distributing the underlying data across more platforms, introducing additional integrations, intermediaries and complexity.

But what if data owners could increase access to their intelligence without continually moving or duplicating their most valuable asset?

From data ownership to signal monetisation

This is an area I'm particularly excited about, especially given the work we're doing with Outra and our recently announced partnership with Experian. Outra has incredibly valuable intelligence, including home-mover signals that help advertisers connect with consumers at moments when they're making important purchasing decisions. Through AUDIENCES, those signals can become accessible across more activation environments while Outra retains control of its underlying data.

It's a different way of thinking about monetisation. Rather than asking where data needs to be distributed next, we can focus on where customers want to activate those signals and how we make that possible.

Our partnership with Experian takes this opportunity to another level, bringing together a significant identity scale with independent, cloud-native activation infrastructure. And I think independence is particularly important here. Data owners shouldn't have to commit to a single identity ecosystem or media platform to unlock the value of their intelligence. They should have the freedom to connect with the partners and destinations that make sense for their business.

That's the role we see AUDIENCES playing: connecting the environments where valuable data lives with the places where it can generate commercial value.

Different businesses. Different outcomes. The same opportunity.

What excites me most about this next chapter is that we're addressing a common challenge across businesses with very different commercial objectives.

For brands, success might mean lower acquisition costs, better retention and stronger returns from media investment.

For publishers, it might mean creating new revenue streams from the audience intelligence they already possess.

For data providers, it's about greater distribution, increased demand and more opportunities to monetise valuable signals.

But the underlying principle is the same. Businesses should be able to retain control of their data while making their intelligence more accessible, actionable and commercially valuable. And that brings me back to the central theme of my presentation. For too long, we've treated privacy and performance as competing priorities. We've assumed that making data more useful means moving it further, copying it more often or giving up some degree of control. I don't believe that a trade-off is necessary.

With the right infrastructure, better governance can enable better activation. Better activation creates more opportunities for businesses to put their intelligence to work. And ultimately, that's what delivers better commercial outcomes. Performance without compromise shouldn't be about finding the right balance between privacy and performance. It should be about building technology where businesses don't have to choose in the first place.