The third-party data party is over. What comes next for marketers?

We explore how the battle for privacy, demise of the third-party cookie, growing investment into first-party data and second-party data partnerships are changing nature of data-driven marketing


Tooling up for a first-party world

The shift from third-party data still leaves some marketers scrambling to find workarounds. Their shift to building first-party data capabilities comes at a time, however, when rising public interest in data privacy has also raised awareness among their colleagues of the importance of using and protecting data.

“It has gone from a back-office topic to a CXO topic,” says Mulesoft chief marketing officer, Lindsey Irvine. “If you think about business in general, everyone is realising the importance of data because of the criticality it plays in delivering new digital experiences and services.

“For marketers and others within the business, [the challenge is] to think of data and integration as critical to their ability to accelerate digital transformation and accelerate the innovation that they need to deliver value for their customers.

“Increasingly it is becoming top-of-mind for business leaders, because without data you can’t deliver what your customers are requiring.”

Irvine suggests the future lies in creating data architectures that are flexible, secure, compliant and governable at the data asset level.

“You need to create a data architecture that allows you to plug-and-play and unlock data in a way that is designed for change,” Irvine says. “How you do it matters, because of the regulation and the compliance environment, and because of the risks associated with it. Unlocking data in a way that drives security and governance and compliance at the API level, so that you can ensure it can be managed and monitored and the right permissions applied to it.”

While some marketers may have been caught off-guard, according to Adobe’s APAC head of product strategy and marketing for data management, identity and privacy, Gabbi Stubbs, many of the topics being debated now have been in play for the better part of a decade.

“What is surprising to most of us is that nobody really acted on this,” she says. “Some of what we are seeing at the moment are levels of panic around people trying to operationalise or infill strategies and technologies at the eleventh hour.

“Those mature clients are significantly well off, and their positioning has been a steady growth path as opposed to a real step change. They are at the point where they can do really strong reach-outs to other parties around collaboration, which is where the biggest market change starts to happen.”

In the post-third-party cookie world, Stubbs says the future will see second-party partnerships between brands, publishers and other parts of the ecosystem become critical.

“The technology that is going to be the saviour is technology that enables clients to centralise and operationalise their own first party data and be able to activate off that,” Stubbs says. “What this does is also provide significantly better opportunities for higher quality second-party relationships with either publishers or other brands. Most of that will be centred around explicit consent and being able to build out the trust of the consumers and ensure that the applicability and the use of the data is highly relevant, highly personal, highly respectful, purposeful, makes sense, and is being used for a legitimate business reason.”

Walking the knife edge

But as these partnerships become more common, they are also likely to attract greater scrutiny from privacy advocates and regulators. It may only take one significant breach of trust – deliberate or inadvertent – for the regulatory regime to be re-examined once more.

Globally, the focus on consumer rights and privacy protections has put everyone on notice that current freedoms will only remain place so long as regulators are satisfied they are not being abused.

“We’ve got an opportunity to regulate ourselves,” says SAS CMO and executive VP, Jennifer Chase. “The more we as marketers recognise that privacy is a competitive advantage, and not just something you need to do because you are afraid of some upcoming legislation, we will elevate the craft of marketing if we can all think that way.

“There are so many passive ways that data is collected, we need to make sure we are honouring the gift of the data that’s given to us.”

With this in mind, Chase says SAS has created an internal privacy champions network including representation from product development, legal and IT, as well as marketing, to constantly look at practices and what legislation might be coming, while also understanding how customers want to engage.

“[We are building] the ability for us to understand our customers and build our first-party day more strongly and then design and curate customer journeys that are very personalised and contextual,” Chase says. “It sets us up to be future proof for any legislation. We know legislation is coming our way. It is just going to happen.”

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