In association with LiveRamp, New Digital Age recently invited a panel of industry experts to discuss the challenges of innovation in the modern business world and, in particular, the role that data collaboration is set to play for marketers over the next few years.
NDA editor Justiin Pearse chaired the discussion where he was joined by: James Damaa, Senior Manager – Global Strategic Data Capability, Costa Coffee; Charlotte Skornik, Head of Client Measurement UK at TikTok; Jo Holdaway, Chief Data & Marketing Officer, The Independent; James Trott Sr. Director, Global Addressable Media, The Coca-Cola Company; plus Reza Amiri-Garroussi. Head of Addressability, and Naomi Yonge, Data Science Manager, both of LiveRamp in the UK.
Yonge spoke of how brands’ increasing desire to quantify the value of their media and tech investments is driving them towards new ways of measuring success and, ultimately, towards greater levels of collaboration.
“As a tech partner, we’re also seeing more brands asking us to quantify the total value of investing in our platform, as there’s a lot of choice in the martech space.
“Marketers are no longer depending on metrics like click through rates and viewability; today, they’re more likely to focus on things like ‘attention’ or demonstrating an actual impact on sales. It’s about choosing the KPIs and metrics that are right for your business, then designing the framework and finding the measurement partners that you need.”
FMCG brands are focused on driving sales, but those sales are split across many different retailers, said Yonge. Right now, however, those separate retailers may be resistant to putting their transaction data in a single ‘clean room’ environment where it can be analysed together.
“Technically, we can join those datasets together, but commercially the data owners are still fairly cautious. The tests we’ve done so far show that being able to quantify the power of activating across multiple channels drives a lot of additional value, so I expect attitudes towards data collaboration to evolve quickly.”
Trott agreed that, as an FMCG brand, Coca-Cola sees an “immense amount of value” in data collaboration and praised the retail community for the work they have done to make their datasets more accessible to brands.
“We have a decent amount of first-party data but it doesn’t always have a lot of depth, so the idea of being able to collaborate to gain a deeper understanding of our customers is obviously an attractive one.
“Retailers have already brought a lot to the table in terms of insights without the need for a lot of data collaboration, but I think the space for collaboration will continue to grow and evolve. We’re still fairly early in the journey of discovering exactly what that will look like.”
Publishing partners
Providing a publisher’s perspective on data collaboration, Holdaway said: “Given the governance around personal data in recent years, GDPR and the like, it’s not surprising that many organisations remain nervous about data collaboration. However, I think confidence is growing around things like clean rooms and the idea that your data will be treated with respect.
“Brand thinking has moved on from using first-party data simply for authenticated users and data match rates, which never delivered the scale that advertisers are looking for, to using first-party data as a ‘seed’ audience to model and discover lookalike and adjacent audiences at scale.”
Holdaway added: ”The interoperability of different data cloud providers is improving all the time, so the interest in data collaboration right now is huge.”
Amiri-Garroussi spoke of how, in his role with LiveRamp, he works with a range of publishers who have invested “a lot of time and resource” into their authentication and first-party data strategies.
“Publishers revenue models have traditionally been based on ad revenues so they have always been striking a balance between understanding the needs of their audience and meeting the needs of advertisers. Over the next 12 to 24 months, I expect to see many more publishers work to better understand, commercialise and leverage their own first-party data. As well as helping to futureproof the publishers and create new revenue streams, that’s what advertisers are increasingly looking for.”
The human touch
Skornik believes that many of the brand advertisers on TikTok are on a ‘measurement journey’ that will inevitably lead to more collaboration in the media marketplace. However, she warned that the greatest barriers to collaboration and innovation are usually human factors, rather than technical issues.
“The key to data collaboration, and innovation and collaboration in general, is allowing people with different backgrounds, different experience, different point of views to come together and creating a safe space within your organisation for new ideas to be explored. You need time to investigate and build a business case, before you engage stakeholders and try to take them on the journey with you.”
Damaa agreed and pointed to the importance of patience and ‘soft skills’ to making any innovative idea a reality inside a large scale business like Costa Coffee.
“Marketers don’t generally like the word ‘patience’ but, with any large scale innovation project, it’s unlikely that you’re going to see instant results. At Costa, we’ve been working with LiveRamp on how we activate our first-party data and paid media, testing lots of small scale use cases against various KPIs. It’s going to take time, but we’ll see the journey through and keep stakeholders up to date at every stage.”
Whether your organisation’s marketing goals are short-term or long-term in outlook, our panel of experts are convinced there’s a role for data collaboration in your plans for the future.
