The deprecation of widespread 3rd party cookie use from last year into this one, has been primarily at the hands of Google. Their Privacy Sandbox rollout, which shifts authorisation, measurement and analytics to their browser, Google Chrome. This has started to force advertisers and media owners to augment their current data-led solutions for targeting and attribution away from their current providers. But augment to what? If you do not want to live entirely within the Google technology and data ecosystem, this question may be getting asked more frequently.
Reluctantly, also being asked, do we really need these external data sources? And more recently, how are these 3rd parties actually capturing that data that we have relied on for so long? Whereas in the past this may have simply been a question of quality and performance, now it also includes a question of legality. This naturally has caused businesses to challenge that historical status quo. They’ll think harder about what they do in the future around targeted and personalised advertising. As a result, we are now seeing a concerted push to evaluate. Heavily commercialise advertiser and media owners’ 1st party data, together with auditing collection, transmission and storage.
The future of 1st party data
Google is fast becoming even more of a wall garden than it has been in the past. It remains to be seen if this will cause advertisers to push more ad spend into social wall gardens like Facebook or will there be a gradual revolt and emergence of true contenders to this duopoly? Or will Google’s announcement to start development of the Publisher Provided Identifier (PPID) see an industry hybrid model of sorts? This will inevitably empower the premium media owner once again.
Proprietary data owners are now valuing, using (and guarding) their data more as a result of Google’s moves and the GDPR’s creation; especially those data sets that help to profile and define end-users, consumers and their behaviour. These moves have rapidly caused 1st party data use to become much more coherent and effective. This is the most direct link a brand advertiser or media owner can have to its user or consumer. So, this will ultimately accelerate and ensure the continuance of either exclusivity or differentiation. The generation of bottom-line value in this new, data security-conscious world.
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