The importance of third-party data
In today’s marketing landscape, advertisers, agencies and platforms all rely on data to shape strategies and achieve success. Specifically, trusted third-party data can influence decision-making processes, scalability, campaign optimisation, and addressing segmentation challenges.
Experian UK recently published a report in collaboration with The Drum, casting a spotlight on the use of third-party data across the customer lifecycle. Through a series of roundtables and interviews, various stakeholders from the marketing data landscape shared their insights on third-party data. In this blog we summarise the unique perspectives and overlapping goals of advertisers, agencies, and platforms, uncovering how they leverage third-party data to understand customers, optimise campaigns, and meet business objectives.
What do brand/advertiser’s want from third-party data?
Brands and advertisers strive to deepen their understanding of customers and prospects, in order to communicate more effectively and offer better products and services. For a brand/advertiser, key considerations include:
- Consistency and Reliability: Advertisers seek consistent, reliable, and trustworthy third-party data to make informed decisions, reduce errors, and enhance decision-making processes
- Scale and Scope: Particularly for global companies, having access to larger data sets becomes crucial for comprehensive insights, enabling brands to scale up and stay competitive in an increasingly dynamic marketplace
- Accelerated Decision-Making: Third-party data empowers advertisers to make faster decisions, activate campaigns efficiently, and enhance consumer experiences, ultimately drive improved business efficiency.
How are advertising agencies using third-party data?
Agencies who plan and execute digital advertising campaigns for brands, also value a deep understanding of customers, but they must contextualise with broader consumer behaviour to develop insights and deliver effective campaigns. Agency perspectives include:
- Effective Planning: Third-party data assists advertising agencies in upfront planning, enabling them to develop strategies that resonate with the selected audience and drive impactful campaigns from the start
- Optimised Campaign Performance: During campaign execution, leveraging third-party data allows agencies to optimise performance by refining audience segmentation, improving message relevance, and enhancing overall campaign effectiveness
- Valuable Insights and Continuous Improvement: Third-party data provides valuable insights that fuel future learnings, audience segmentation, and campaign planning. By analysing the data generated throughout the customer journey, agencies establish a continuous improvement loop, making data-driven decisions and refining strategies over time
What do platforms think of third-party data?
Platforms (for example social media, CTV, DSP, and programmatic) play a vital role in meeting the data needs of advertisers and agencies, while also exploring the potential value of other data sources. The platform perspectives include:
- Maximising First-Party Data: Platforms leverage third-party data signals to make first-party data work harder, minimising wastage and improving segmentation accuracy
- Enhanced Reach and Engagement: Third-party data enables platforms to effectively reach users who are more likely to engage with the brands’ products or services, particularly at scale. This is particularly powerful in the realm of Connected TV (CTV), which combines digital segmentation advantages with the mass reach of traditional television advertising
- Addressing Segmentation Challenges: For brands with limited first-party data, third-party data provides invaluable for platforms enabling effective audience segmentation, addressing the challenges of audience identification and engagement
Overall, stakeholders across the marketing data ecosystem recognise the continued importance of third-party data in understanding consumers, improving campaign performance, and meeting broader business objectives. Advertisers emphasise scale and speed, advertising agencies focus on present optimisation and future insights, while platforms aim to maximise the effectiveness of first-party data and address segmentation challenges. By harnessing the power of third-party data, stakeholders can unlock new opportunities and drive remarkable marketing results.
How can we help?
We can help you identify your best customers, find more of them, and then coordinate seamless and intelligent interactions across the most appropriate channels. For example, Experian Mosaic can help you to deepen customer loyalty, strengthen brand advocacy and maximise profits.
Being effective across all channels – from traditional offline to digital TV and online display – the Mosaic consumer classification enables accurate and consistent segmentation, so consumers receive content that’s relevant to them.