Driving digital transformation through collaboration
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Better collaboration should bring about a better ecosystem where advertisers have a deeper understanding of their customers, writes the head of strategic growth EU at LiveRamp
In the last few years, the adtech industry has undergone some of the biggest changes since its inception, from privacy regulations to fundamental changes in technology.
Today, marketers must ensure consumers have control over their data, while also mitigating the risks of changes in the ecosystem.
One of the biggest challenges facing marketers is the deprecation of third-party cookies, which have traditionally enabled data-driven targeting and measurement, and provided access to the KPIs needed to hold media accountable. Consequently, their deprecation leaves marketers open to the risk of lower ROI from paid marketing activity.
Rather than focusing on the negative, we should embrace these changes and shift our focus towards creating more sustainable and consumer-first alternatives that allow us to evaluate performance in a better way.
At first glance, some advertisers may feel a simple solution would be to move their entire budget into walled gardens that continue to provide audience addressability, such as Facebook and Google.
However, consolidating spend into one or two platforms presents new risks of dependency and leaves marketers open to rapid and unforeseen changes within these environments that can impact their planning and performance.
Putting everything into Facebook and Google also limits marketers’ ability to measure across platforms and reach audiences in other places. With the rise of authenticated solutions that enable the open web to mimic the capabilities of the walled gardens, marketers can diversify their strategies and reach consumers where they spend the majority of their time in a deterministic and privacy-first way.
With cookie deprecation looming and the rise of privacy regulation, marketers are placing more emphasis on building deeper relationships with customers. Not only does this form the basis for building a data foundation, it also enables delivering the type of personalised experiences that customers have come to expect.
Marketers can further expand their understanding of their customer by partnering with trusted businesses to access second-party data in a highly-controlled manner, using configurable privacy controls to control exactly who can access the data, how and when.
By building a solid data foundation, marketers can not only deliver more personalised experiences but also measure performance more efficiently and effectively. It is critical for marketers to independently evaluate their success on the platforms they use.
Many advertisers are starting to leverage “clean room” environments to better measure the value of their marketing. With the right analytical tools and collaborative models, these solutions can provide deep campaign, customer, and business insights in a controlled environment, all while balancing the need to protect customer data with the business need to optimise outcomes.
More advanced solutions like LiveRamp Safe Haven keep brands in full control of their data by providing configurable privacy controls that allow them to connect data from proprietary data sources (including transaction data, for instance) with other internal or external partner data sets without sacrificing privacy.
As an added benefit, Safe Haven also provides brands the ability to seamlessly integrate with other platform clean rooms like those offered by Google and Facebook. This cross-platform approach gives the brand a deeper, fuller picture of the customer journey and empowers them to run better personalisation, targeting and campaign measurement.
As rapid changes occur within the industry, marketers must act now to mitigate risks and grow their businesses effectively to be well-positioned for the future; this means working out how to continue operating at scale on the open web without third-party cookies, continuing to maintain addressability, and actively engaging with with platform partners, including Google and Facebook.
Marketers must now also become more open to collaboration to plug the gaps that brands have in their understanding of customers that inevitably arise when they do not know how their customers are interacting with other brands or partners.
Ultimately, this should lead us to a better ecosystem that gives advertisers a deeper understanding of their customers, more flexibility, better performance and strong partnerships to enhance customer experiences.