Today, data is THE fundamental element in digital advertising, but that doesn’t mean every data issue has been resolved. According to a recent Forrester report, brands still feel there are hurdles to jump when it comes to easily sharing second-party data. That is, data sourced from other brands or the publishers ultimately serving ads, which can be used by the brand for more accurate targeting or buying decisions.
So how can brands and publishers strengthen their bonds and allow for easy sharing of second-party data? This is not actually as complex or daunting as it seems, and brands actually hold a lot of the power provided they want to drive the data sharing conversation.
Major advertisers often don’t have any trouble receiving data from publisher partners. Big brand marketers have so much buying power that publishers are often happy to share data, often in the form of unique audience segments for the consumers visiting their sites.
However what many find surprising is that actually, it’s not just big brands that have this kind of influence – it’s not all about buying power. Thinking back to the days before programmatic buying, when media planners knew there was a difference between buying on huge portals like Yahoo and AOL and based their decisions on that knowledge. While content, scale, and quality of audience helped differentiate publishers, the real separation came with how those publishers segmented their audience, which in turn affected the buyers’ ability to target and deliver performance.
That kind of insight has been largely lost in programmatic. Brands are able to use their own first-party data and supplement that with third-party data, but as these segments are created by the brands the data they have only tells one side of each target consumer’s story.
Providing advertisers with both sides of that story offers a massive benefit to both the brand and the publisher. It begins with a much deeper relationship that includes greater investment and better campaigns.
Publishers may object to sharing more data with programmatic buyers under the argument that it further erodes the security they get from direct guaranteed buys. If we look back at our pre-programmatic example, it would seem that the opposite is true. As the industry move toward a programmatic direct model that automates guaranteed buys, publishers willing to offer unique audience segments based on their traffic will differentiate themselves from the competition. A willingness to share these segments in open auctions opens the door for a deeper relationship with the brand that leads to more guaranteed buys and strengthens existing ones.
In turn, this solves publishers’ other major issue, which is accurately forecasting revenues. Building a relationship with a brand in an open exchange is great, but there is no guarantee that any particular brand will win every auction. By moving relationships from the open exchanges to automated guarantees, publishers give themselves much more security.
Here we have described a one-way flow of data from the publisher to the advertiser. There are clear benefits that come from two way flow – even more detailed audience targeting, for one – but that kind of exchange is still a way off. Brands are protective of their data, and as unfair as it is, publishers still sit at the end of the flow of budgets across the media landscape.
Still, so much of the online media conversation focuses on the growing gap between advertiser and publisher. Shrinking this gap and eliminating the middle is in the publisher’s best interest, so it makes sense to willingly share audience data with brands large and small.
Brands, overwhelmed with options when it comes to first- and third-party data, need not fret about hurdles. They simply need to flex their buying power and work closely with publishers. Advertising is a relationship business, and programmatic, for all its automation, works best when leveraged around relationships.
By Mike Peralta, CEO at AudienceScience.
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