By Lachlan McDivitt, General Manager, Client Services, The Trade Desk
With walled gardens and regulatory changes reducing third-party data signals and driving new privacy and security requirements, first-party deterministic data has never been more valuable for advertisers. Major brands spend years building strong relationships with their loyal customers, generating unique and valuable insights regarding their target audiences. These companies recognise the value of first-party data for advertising, and activating that data at scale within a media-buying platform in a privacy-centric manner is a key consideration.
And rightfully so — it’s important that consumers know how, where and why their data is being used. Managing first-party data with consumer privacy has often been a struggle for brands. Specifically, at The Trade Desk, we wanted to enable advertisers to harness the full-capabilities of first-party data, while keeping the consumer top of mind with privacy-conscious technology. The result was Galileo.
Onboarding first-party data into a privacy-conscious environment
Galileo is a new approach for advertisers to activate their first-party data to optimise media buys across all digital media. It helps brands unlock that data in a privacy-conscious manner and find new customers that share similar characteristics. With Galileo, advertisers have advanced audience matching capabilities, made possible by new cross-channel identity solution such as Unified ID 2.0.
These matching capabilities extend across publishers, platforms, devices and channels providing a true omnichannel identity environment for advertisers as they begin to implement more and more omnichannel campaigns.
Leveraging data partners to drive more relevant campaigns
Advertisers should be using first-party data as the foundational building block for all their campaigns, but once this is done, there are even more data options to explore and solidify campaign success.
Similar to first-party data, third-party data is also achieving sophisticated levels of targeting. Targeting consumers that was once based on basic age, gender and location has expanded into a variety of niche data sets that allows brands to handpick the right audiences. Recently, The Trade Desk partnered with Ambee, a global climate tech company, to provide our customers with hyperlocal pollen data, allowing them to target specific areas that are high in pollen. As you can imagine, for a brand of antihistamines, this is a rich data source. Even brands operating in the wider pharmaceutical and health sector could easily find use for this data with the right strategy.
Beyond this, we also work with partners to help advertisers track offline consumer behaviours via footfall data that logs in-store visits. This is increasingly valuable as consumers today are shopping on and offline, underscoring the importance of true omnichannel media strategies.
Harnessing the power of data with an open platform
Equally as important is the transparency Galileo provides. Advertisers working with walled gardens measure their campaigns in black boxes. There’s growing frustration on the inability to measure performance within walled gardens, who essentially grade their own homework. In such closed ecosystems, brands are unable to make objective comparisons, derive insights and fully measure campaigns effectively.
In stark contrast, in an open ecosystem like The Trade Desk, brands can maintain full ownership and portability of their data. Galileo allows advertisers to control how they bring the data into the media buying platform, and how they take it out for measurement, including who they let work with the data in a secure, privacy-safe way.
Creating a positive brand experience for customers starts with ensuring that brands reach them with relevant messages across every device and channel they enjoy. With first-party data at the centre of media-buying strategies, we can advance digital advertising to become more sophisticated for everyone across the entire ecosystem.
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