Marketers want to use their first-party data more as they prepare for the inevitable end to third-party cookies, but they suffer “data paralysis” when confronted with all the options, according to new research by Kantar.

An online survey Kantar conducted in April and May among 672 advertising executives in 39 countries found 81% of respondents believe they should be using their first-party data alongside primary research data from outside.

Data priorities for marketers include taking more control over their own media planning, pursuing direct-to-consumer strategies, and strengthening their own consumer data platforms. In a blow to Byron Sharp, the Australian researcher who long has contended that brands can only grow by reaching out to new customers, 67% of respondents said understanding and retaining current customers is more important to them than acquiring new ones.

But the biggest takeaway is that the now-delayed end of cookie support on Google’s Chrome browser has brought added focus to the value of first-party data marketers get directly from customers. Advertisers rank their own data ahead of other sources on such things as trustworthiness and relevance to objectives. But in-house data ranks low on such things as ease of connection to other data sources. Google and Facebook ranked high there.
 

Among external data sources, competitive ad intelligence and syndicated survey research ranked low among advertisers on ease of access and customization capabilities.

Some 60% of advertisers said enhancing their own data with data from other sources is going to become more important in the years ahead, and the same number expect insights from their own data to increase, a number that rises to 74% among bigger advertisers with more than 10,000 employees.

The survey found 80% of advertisers want to use their own segmentation to enable media planning and activation, and 54% believe integrating other data sources with their audience segmentation will become more important.

That ups pressure on Google to ensure its Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) can match up with marketers' own segmentation systems based on their first-party or other third-party data sets. Doing that while maintaining privacy compliance will be a challenge, and is one factor that appears to have pushed the company to delay ending cookie support until 2023 as it tests alternatives.

Overall, Kantar found marketers gave data from Google and Facebook higher marks for transparency, trustworthiness and ease of personalization than that from ad tech platforms.

“The findings show the industry clearly has some way to go to leverage all the data sources at our disposal,” said Benjamin Jankowski, senior VP media at Mastercard, in a statement. “First party data isn’t the only game in town!” He called for marketers to be “bolder” and “more aggressive” in their use of other data sources.