It’s My Data And I’ll Target If I Want To – Or Is Someone Else’s Better?

Earlier today myself and Tug’s Head of Biddable Media Ollie, gave a keynote presentation at the IAB on realising the potential of data enhanced targeting and it got me thinking – is third party data really relevant in the current state of the industry? Especially when there seems to be a greater push on getting advertisers to use their 1^st party data.

I guess I should point out that historically, 3^rd party data has had a bit of a rough time as the price of data didn’t always back out to a positive performance metric; but since then data providers have got smarter and the inference gap has been reduced; data segments that can be activated right now without any fancy ad tech are now more advanced and granular than ever but most importantly they’re scalable.

Don’t get me wrong, retargeting and CRM data will always be the richest data that will ever be available but the issue will always be scale. For example, the 3000 email addresses of existing customers that you might have in your CRM platform might be highly valuable, but what happens when you need to grow? This is where 3^rd party data, comes into its own and gives that all important scale.

Over a 24 hour period there are essentially trillions of impressions available through most platforms (provided that impression throttling is not an issue). We, as trading specialists need to be making as many informed decisions as we can on behalf of our clients to ensure that we are harnessing the full power of real time bidding.