Commentary

Protect Your Biggest Investment: Customer Data

Every company, whether brand or publisher, faces a choice when it comes to protecting and growing their most valuable investment: their customer data. 

Most brands spend massive amounts of time, money and energy collecting and nurturing this single greatest asset that defines your company, customers—and the relationships you have with them.

In the world of digital advertising and marketing, every one has a choice to make as stewards of this key company asset—whether you will freely and loosely share your first-party customer data with third-party vendors, or forge a path of data independence.

It’s a defining moment for your brand, and will shape many of the other decisions you’ll make.

Natural instincts tell us to passionately protect what’s already exclusively ours and defines our brand(s) and company. But the road to independence has proven that what is natural does not always come easy.

Typically, there is an “easy button” in front of you in the form of large, single-stack, cloud-based, close-walled marketing solution that says:

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“It’s easy! You just need to upload all of your data to us, then put all of our  third-party pixels on your site. We’ll let you define your segments, and then we’ll build your audience pools, manage your campaigns and deliver insights to everything, everywhere.*”

But here’s the “easy button” *disclaimer:

“Once you upload your data to us, we will charge you a toll to interact with your own customers, restrict usage of the data on other platforms requiring you to use our own platforms, ensure technically inside those platforms that our campaigns and inventory receive a programmatic advantage and improve our industry category algorithms on the back of your data.

“Eventually, we’ll tell you what was once yours exclusively is now ours and how you can/can’t use it. Results may vary, based on third-party limitations like cookie life, blocking, and deletion. But, hey, it’s easy—so it’s worth it.”

Third-party data activation is rampant in our industry, and it is easy. But it comes at the sacrifice of your hard-earned intelligence and investments—rather than protecting or growing your company’s most valuable asset.

When you’ve invested deeply and worked hard to establish meaningful relationships with your customers, why choose the path of least resistance? Follow a path of data independence that requires only the decision to choose it?

As a steward of your customer data asset, it’s a defining moment for you and your brand. There are the same opportunities to do everything you want from within your own digital domain—only sharing data with your internal 1st party advocates.

It comes with many benefits, like new confidence and learning. You will quickly and persistently recognize your customers when you see them across time, channels and devices to empower landing-page personalization.

Also, it gives a more accurate picture of baseline metrics, like unique reach and associated conversions to improve the accuracy of all of your down-stream analytics. Own a more complete data set for understanding everything you do online and offline, even down to the segment level.

Help our industry move further away from the third-party data activation that is so rampant. Move from the disclaimers above that do not protect or grow your greatest investment.

Choose wisely and great things can happen.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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