Optus started diving deep into its first-party data long before the impending death of third-party cookies was announced, says Angela Greenwood, Optus' director of customer acquisition and marketing.
“We're focusing probably too much on the tech stacks and not enough on the people power that we need to really succeed,” she said at today's AdNews LIVE event in Sydney.
“And so that's why I'm here today to argue that it takes a village, not just the tech stack to succeed after the death of third-party cookies.
“You can't go anywhere near a conversation about this cookie-less future without hearing about how crucial it is to focus on your first-party data.
“That's easier said than done, right? As marketers, particularly here in large organizations, you've got data in siloed legacy systems. It's a big job to unify it, to clean it up and, most importantly, to make it actionable.
“Over four years ago, we saw the opportunity to partner with people across our organization.”
Originally not created to meet a cookie-less future, the data sets have put Optus in a good place.
The data helps to activate audiences in digital media.
The key questions: How can we optimise a better return on ad spend? Or how can we look at the characteristics of our most valuable customers and find more of them?
“We are lucky enough to now be far enough along our maturity curve, to be able to build out really granular audiences,” she says.
“We do think that it gives us a greater consent controls and privacy compliant features, which are obviously something that we all need to think about.”
She recommends asking: Are you collaborating with the right people across your organisation and the right vendors?
Optus is also collaborating with Google on to build predictive modelling and high intent audiences.
“What we're doing is we're actually harnessing the power of the cloud and machine learning to create our own amazing genetically engineered baby audiences that are growing up rapidly to become our very own honours students,” she says.
“Our baby audiences begin their life as anonymous web user data tied to the Google analytics ID.
“We then feed this into the Google cloud platform. We slice and dice over 700 features.
“It predicts whether a web user is going to convert on a post-paid mobile product within the next 14 days. And it looks at those 700 features and says, Which of these features is the greatest predictors of that behaviour?
“So every single morning at 6.30am the data reruns and our babies grow up that little bit more.”
AdNews would like to thank our supporting partners: Foxcatcher, Foxtel Media, Integral Ad Science, LiSTNR and The Trade Desk and associate partner Captify.
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