How to make first-party data work for your brand

More than four years since Google first announced the eventual demise of third-party cookies, cookie deprecation is finally underway—with the promise that 100% will be gone by the end of 2024. However, many marketers still don’t have a clear strategy to deal with this enormous change in how they aggregate consumer data, according to industry experts. In response, the concept of first-party data as a cure-all has become almost as much of a cliché as “the death of cookies.” But a recent Vericast study conducted in partnership with Prosper Insights & Analytics found that 73% of respondents believe most first-party data solutions today do not deliver effective media across print and digital channels. Vericast Senior VP Marc Mathies joined a special Studio 30 bonus episode of Ad Age’s Marketer’s Brief to discuss what brands can do to find the right first-party data solution and future proof their marketing strategies. “Collecting more first-party data and building out the profiles of your customers is a tactic that cannot be disputed in terms of the benefit and the value,” Mathies said, yet he suggested that the pessimism of the majority of respondents to the Vericast-Prosper study was due to two basic reasons: cost and understanding what the platform is supposed to do. “They bought into a technology that was extraordinarily expensive,” he said. “They’ve seen ‘scope-creep’ happening because they didn’t have a necessary focus on how it impacts advertising. Plus, I think some people just yet haven’t stitched together how they’re going to get from point A to point B. How are you going to take first-party data, which has largely been up until this point in the industry used for retention and loyalty plays, to engage customers directly and apply it to the acquisition funnel?” A CDP built for marketers by marketers In February, Vericast announced the launch of NXTDRIVE, a customer data marketing platform, to help brands and marketers take first-party data to connect these stages of the funnel. Vericast is billing NXTDRIVE as a customer data marketing platform (CDMP), as opposed to the more prosaic customer data platform (CDP). Like a leading edge CDP, the platform unites all of a brand’s disparate first-party data, including CRM as well as purchase history, behaviors and website visits over time, and stitches them together into a 360-degree view of a customer. Vericast distinguishes NXTDRIVE by its collaborative approach with brand marketers. “Where a lot of CDPs and other solutions fall short is they build a tool set, and they hand the already overburdened marketing team login credentials and maybe some training, and then expect them to build their first-party data strategy,” said Mathies. “We didn’t want to stop there. We wanted to take the decades of history that we have to truly be an extension of the marketing team at the brands, and help them develop the strategy together.” This collaborative approach was also core to building the CDMP. Vericast examined various use cases from brand partners to enable smarter marketing decisions, simplify and safeguard first-party customer data, make first-party customer data actionable, and drive value and efficiency by consolidating the marketing stack. One of those brand partners was American Furniture Warehouse, a regional furniture company looking to expand into new markets and gain insights into what drives customers into traditional brick-and-mortar stores. “What they knew was that customers would travel up to 20 miles to come into their stores,” Matthies said. “The modeling that we’ve created within NXTDRIVE has the ability to determine whether households that fall within a certain geography are likely to be customers or not, based on attributes that we’ve learned from looking at their first-party data sources. We quickly realized that there were a lot of customers for American Furniture Warehouse that were outside of the 20-mile radius. We were able to map it all the way out to a 40-mile radius, and ran some advertising to test against that. The result: We saw a 55% sales lift and turned a ROAS of about $6.92 for those early tests.” What’s next in a post-cookie world? If past is prologue, then it’s very difficult to foresee how total cookie deprecation will play out the rest of this year—or whether it will actually happen by December 31. But Mathies said a handful of trends are certain to develop as deprecation continues despite any naysaying from the industry. “Targeting tactics have to change,” he said. “One of those is leaning into your first-party data strategy, but the other is contextual targeting. It’s not a new concept, but because of the amount of work and the learning that we’ve done over the past few years, contextual targeting has taken on a whole new life in terms of the intelligence that is now behind it.” And of course, AI looms large on all aspects of the industry, including data management. Not surprisingly, Mathies views adoption of that technology through the same lens as managing a first-party data platform. “Right now, there’s a significant barrier to entry into some of the more complicated uses of AI,” Mathies said. “As an industry, we cannot let that happen. So many marketing teams are small and overburdened, and are being asked to do more with less. AI should be there to make a marketer’s job easier, and they shouldn’t have to have a computer science degree as well as their marketing degree to be able to do their job. We would take on that mantle as a vendor partner and bring our data science team along with us to help our clients. I would implore others who are suppliers and vendors and agencies in this space to do the same. We have to help marketers use AI to their advantage.” About Vericast Vericast is a marketing technology company that provides a data-rich approach to influence consumers and drive meaningful commerce. We power smarter activations for more than 15,000 clients in consumer packaged goods, financial, grocery, restaurant, retail and more. Our decades of experience, advanced technologies and broad solutions portfolio help companies reach audiences with precision and scale.

How to make first-party data work for your brand

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