Marketers find first-party strategies easier said than done

As appeared on Digiday on 11 October 2022, read here.

Despite rhetoric from advertisers about investing in first-party data as privacy laws erode traditional means of targeting — the reality is much more difficult, according to a recent survey on programmatic attitudes.

In the U.S., the IAB’s State of Data report observed that while marketers there are “collecting a wide range of first-party data and enhancing it with third-party data” doing so at scale is a challenge.

One source, who works inside the media department of a global gaming company explained some of the dynamics at play to Digiday. “I’ve got first-hand experience of just being in rooms with many big brands, who don’t have data at the core of their business and just struggling to figure out how do we scale efforts by their assets,” said the source, who declined to be named as they weren’t cleared to speak with press.

Ruben Schreurs, group CPO at Ebiquity, observed how the scale of the challenge facing any given marketing team can depend on what business vertical their brand is operating in. For instance, those in e-commerce, financial services and gaming etcetera are likely to have a rich trove of (consented) customer data they can use as the basis of their comms strategies. This is because companies in these verticals often require prospective customers to volunteer information such as an email address or income levels, as part of their service.

Compare this to the teams at brands whose customer contact is often through an intermediary such as a retailer, or automotive dealership — although Schreurs spoke of first-hand experience of car marques that have made great strides in this regard recently — and the difference in the scale of the challenge facing such marketers becomes apparent.

“You also have a lot of big CPG brands or clothing manufacturers that have signed global contracts for DMPs and CDPs but they’re starting to devest because they’ve got all this first-party data that’s great in terms of utility that it could bring but it’s just not relevant to their business model,” added Schreurs.

“Many are thinking, ‘We can’t invent a new way of doing our commerce [such as direct online sales] for the sake of fuelling a database’… one of the few examples of brands that have done so very well is Adidas which has created an incredibly robust owned and operated e-commerce strategy.”