Impact – 4
David Finkelstein in Forbes: “One solution that is currently being touted by companies big and small is look-alike audience modeling powered by machine learning. What sets look-alike audience modeling apart is that it does not rely heavily on third-party data and, instead, can enable companies to leverage their first-party data. Look-alike audience solutions leverage companies’ first-party data to create a highly accurate, scalable model of a company’s ideal target consumers. Powered by machine learning technologies, the algorithms analyze large sets of nationwide consumer data and identify those consumers who share the same characteristics as the company’s top current customers. This look-alike audience model may then be used to look for other potential customers in a third-party data ecosystem that matches the needs of that particular brand. This allows companies to progressively scale up their audiences and reach potential customers in new geographic areas.”
Martech: ““Everybody will be having to tap into first parties,” April Mullen [of Sparkpost] said. “If they weren’t using a CDP two years ago, they’ll have to now. The benefit of a CDP is that if one channel goes dark on you, it’s stitching together a lot of these complex data sets and making them usable across all your channels.” The emphasis on relationships with valued customers obviously privileges first-party data over shared third-party data. Further restrictions on data through email makes some first-party data scarce and even more valuable.”.. “In first party data relationships, privacy needs to be the standard,” Jeremy Hlavacek [of IBM Watson Advertising] said. “The way for marketers to fight back is to have first party relationships instead of having a data relationship with an advertiser.
Benedict Evans writes: “Before the internet, that meant car ads in car magazines and watch ads in the Economist. Ads were based on context, and on inferring the audience from the context. The internet gave advertisers the opposite axis – it let them show ads based on the reader instead of the page. One side-effect of this was relocation of value – you can target an Economist reader a week later on a different website… Before the internet you couldn’t choose between shops or ads, but now that’s all the same algebra – how do you reach and serve a customer? If the cookie apocalypse resets the numbers for display, that money can go to search, but it can also go to Fedex or landlords. Which lever do you pull? The entire ad privacy fight is one moving part in a debate about how you reach your customers and how you spend a total of, perhaps, $7-800bn in the USA alone each year.”
He adds in his newsletter: “Apple clearly thinks privacy is the new malware: open systems are being abused in unintended ways and it’s the platform provider’s job to stop this, just as it was for Microsoft 20 years ago. The trouble is that, unlike malware, privacy also conflicts with the way a lot of advertising has worked online for 20 years, and funds open unrestricted access to things like newspapers. Cookies are going away, but we don’t know what happens next.”
