First-party data has come into vogue in 2020 as brands seek out the best way to personalise their marketing communications and remain privacy compliant.
Tealium vice president and general manager APJ Will Griffith told AdNews the data solutions business has seen a rise in brands approaching them for help with their personalisation strategies now that the spotlight is on first-party data.
“It's getting a lot of attention quite high up in organizations,” Griffith says.
“Partly because of some of the normal best practice reasons [and] partly because of the change in the marketplace around third-party cookies and third-party data.”
Tealium, an independent player in the marketplace, has been working with first-party data since the business’ inception in 2008.
The company has experienced increased interest in what it does recently, following Google Chrome’s announcement that it would remove third-party cookies from its browser and the growing number of data privacy laws being enacted around the world.
With these changes in the data landscape, Griffith says the business is working brands to organise and build first-party data strategies.
“Most organisations, the challenge they're having today is that their first-party data strategy is really disorganised and they're not doing the basics of unifying what first-party data they have to make an incremental difference,” he says.
The myriad of advertising and marketing technologies available also adds a challenge as brands invest in multiple with little understanding of how they work together.
Griffith says many are siloed but Tealium has been working with brands to resolve this and help them yield a better return from the tech stacks they do have.
“A lot of organisations have invested in quite a lot of different technologies and they're scratching their head a little bit now to get them to work properly,” he says.
“The common denominator across it is that they tend to be quite siloed and they don't all work off the same view of an individual, and we solved that problem as well.”
Getting personal
Machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) have been driving personalisation at scale.
Tealium has jumped on this bandwagon with the recent launch of its own machine learning solution, Predict.
Griffith says it was designed to be marketing-friendly and accessible.
Monash University is among the first organisations to use it.
“They're starting now to see some great returns from using our machine learning,” Griffith says.
“[They’re] trying to deliver the best experience for students across the lifecycle, but mainly around how they connect with new students who are going through the application process and considering Monash the right place to study.
“We're really helping them trying to get the data and try and provide a really great experience.”
Tealium currently works businesses across a number of industries including financial services, healthcare, higher education and media to improve their personalisation strategies.
It has also been working with Woolworths and the supermarket’s digital arm WooliesX.
“For them it's all about personalization scale, working towards creating really useful moments of personalization in as close to real time as possible so that their customers really feel like the Woolies brand knows them and understands them,” he says.
Personalisation sits on a fine line that can be easy to cross into “creepy” territory.
Griffith says it all comes down to the data a company has and how it is used.
“If you have a more joined up picture, you have less gaps and it's gaps that caused the problems,” he says.
“More often the problem is that it's not that you don't have the data, it's just that you're not very good at joining it together quickly in real time, and then putting it to use in the right place quickly.”
If marketers are able to educate themselves on best practice and how to stitch the first-party data they have together, Griffith believes it will only produce positive outcomes.
“I think we'll hear less of the ads following you around the internet scenario, which I think is a good thing for marketing and for advertising,” he says.
“It's about educating people about what they can do if they bring their data together and how they could develop the first-party data strategy that drives relevance, that drives personalization, and that can drive the right kind of business outcomes.”
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