by Dan Scudder, CEO of Highland Math
Third-party data has been under pressure over the last 12-months. CCPA regulation has increased scrutiny on data privacy. Industry organizations such as the IAB are developing increased transparency tools through their data labeling initiative. And major publishers such as The New York Times have announced a transition away from third-party data with a focus only on first-party data going forward.
So if you previously bought third-party data, what do you do? Is there a future here? Is the data really worth investing in going forward, given what everyone is saying?
Although there is a perceived divestment from traditional “third-party data” as we know it, the need for data is not going to decline. Marketers are going to be pushed to spend their budgets in more measurable ways going forward, and data is going to be the fuel for rich audience targeting and intelligent measurement.
The coronavirus economic shock and resulting budget pressures will accelerate these already underlying trends. Programmatic advertising environments will be the standard across all channels – online display, connected TV, mobile, and more — all of which will rely on data as an ingredient to marketing success.
Enter the data marketplace. Data aggregators will continue to add value as curators of datasets that are high performing, transparent, and privacy safe. Buying data will feel different than blindly acquiring a set of third-party data, but the outcomes will be the same, if not better.
Marketers can go into a data marketplace, access all sorts of data from large name compilers, emerging data startups, 1st-party data sellers, 2nd-party data sharing arrangements, and more. The data will be scored on quality, privacy, and transparency metrics. And there will be more and more marketplaces to choose from that allow for universal integration of data into a marketer’s system of record, including the Amazon Data Marketplace and the Snowflake Data Exchange.
Data will continue to fuel intelligent marketing and customer insight, driving powerful customer experiences for brands and leading to new forms of innovation. And despite the headlines, data isn’t going away — marketers should continue to invest in building out a data strategy and procuring the right data assets for their business by leveraging partners and data marketplaces.
Dan Scudder is CEO of Highland Math, a data monetization platform that powers internal and external data monetization strategies. Previously, Dan Scudder was co-founder and GM of Data at LiveRamp.
