Privacy and data protection on the one hand, profiling and personalisation of the customer experience on the other: when it comes to personal information, brands, marketers, advertisers, and martech and adtech operators more generally often find themselves having to balance two seemingly irreconcilable aspects.
The long-awaited deprecation of third-party cookies by Google as well has, in fact, heralded the beginning of a momentous turning point in the advertising and marketing world, paving the way for new challenges and great opportunities in terms of creating user-targeted strategies.
- Goodbye to Third Party Cookies: companies ready for the challenge
- Part I data: the value that comes from trust
- Publisher and Advertiser: first-party-data and data collaboration
Goodbye to Third Party Cookies: companies ready for the challenge
If for users the end of third-party cookies means greater respect for their privacy, for businesses it means greater difficulty in collecting data to create marketing and advertising strategies that focus on personalisation and enhancing the customer experience.
A survey conducted by Capterra among a sample of 258 marketing professionals in Italy (“The age of data without cookies 2024“) has, however, revealed how as many as 67 percent of companies are not frightened by this momentous change, which, on the contrary, they see as an opportunity to create value.
The collected data also show that although, 68 percent of respondents recognise the great usefulness of third-party cookies especially for purposes related to personalization of advertising campaigns, in fact, only 5 percent of the sample said they were “very” or “extremely concerned” about their disappearance.
Among the measures, some of which have already been adopted, are solutions aimed at leveraging corporate properties as a key channel for first-party data collection while fully respecting user privacy.
First Party data: the value that comes from trust
By the term “first-party data,” as we know, we denote all data related to users that, when collected on company properties, are in fact owned by the company. This category includes, for example, demographic data, behavioural data related to browsing and purchasing paths, just to name a few. Historically, digital marketing has made little use of first-party data, but increasingly stringent privacy regulations and the gradual deprecation of third-party cookies have turned the spotlight on their potential.
Evolved profiling and segmentation of one’s audience through in-depth knowledge of one’s users, but that’s not all: first-party data is also a strategic resource in advertising. Obviously, the richer and more detailed this data is, the more it enables the creation of winning marketing strategies. With first-party data, it is important to focus on collection while always keeping clear the objectives for which it is being done.
In fact, let us not forget that first-party-data, and even more so zero-party-data, are linked to valuable information about users that is released by users in the context of a relationship with the brand: the more value users perceive to derive from the relationship with the brand itself, the higher the likelihood that they will release personal information, provided that the company shows transparency and accountability regarding its use.
Publisher and Advertiser: first-party-data and data collaboration
If for brands and companies the value of first-party data for marketing activities is easily understood, it is less so if we broaden the context to publishers and advertisers, the other two major players in the madtech world.
First-party data, although valuable, does not in itself allow for scalable marketing activities to be deployed: the reach of campaigns activated on these will always be lower than what is allowed with the use of third-party cookies.
This is where data collaboration comes in, which is the ability for stakeholders to increase the value of their data while fully respecting the privacy of the users involved, ensuring anonymity and allowing each stakeholder to preserve data ownership.
Publishers can thus leverage the enormous amount of data collected on their properties not only to improve the experience of browsing and enjoying content within their pages, but also by enabling advertisers to connect with other proprietary audiences through a protected and secure digital space (data clean room) in which data collaboration takes place without any exchange of data, while fully respecting the privacy of the users concerned.
Here, even in the advertising ecosystem, first-party data takes on significant centrality, opening up great opportunities for stakeholders both in terms of data monetisation and optimisation of creative and campaign effectiveness.
