The impending third party cookie loss has sent many companies scrambling to find alternative methods and solutions to make up for the disappearing data. During our Digital Velocity 22 series, we heard from many leaders in everything from retail to travel to healthcare, covering not only what is changing but also how they are changing to meet the times.
Making First Party Data Available to the Lines of Business
During our Ultimate Sports and Entertainment event, Jason Crain, the Director of Analytics and Insights at Equine Network, emphasized that most companies are sitting on their own useful data. While discussing what approach they would take to facilitate more customer engagement they realized that breaking down data silos with their many lines of business would help define new audiences and open up new opportunities to interact with their customers.
“Our focus has really been to centralize the accessibility of [first party] data and begin to enhance the usability of it by making it available to the lines of business to determine not just profitability, but take communications to people who may not know about the other services that we have or may not understand the difference between the things that our lines of business do and what they might be more used to out in the market.”
– Jason Crain, the Director of Analytics and Insights at Equine Network
Companies are fortunate enough to have a goldmine of data that they are often not utilizing to the fullest extent. Finding the proper tools to collect, organize, and activate your customer data will give you the opportunity to better understand your customers and change the way you do business.
Moving Away From Third Party Cookies Toward People-based Audiencing
Milin Shah, an expert in digital experience & martech at UPS, shared where UPS is now investing their resources as they move away from third party cookies.
“We realized that maybe solving for cookies was not the right thing to do; it was a trigger that got us all going. Fortunately, we’re in a good position, we have so much data. Now we can leverage and start executing on it. Everything is cookie-based today and we have to shift from cookies into a people-based audiencing strategy. On one end, we’re solving for the single source of truth and figuring out what we need to do to augment our CDP, and how to make it work for us.
The other important thing is that the Data Management Platforms, they use cookie-based audiences and those are going away. We are starting to look at what we need to do to evolve our martech tank, moving away from cookie-based platforms into people-based. There are adjacent technologies that we are starting to look at around how to build and move things in real-time. We just invested in Tealium’s EventStream and that’s going to be a huge help in connecting some of the batch processes we had.”
– Milin Shah, Director of Digital Experience at UPS
By shifting not only the tools they use but also the approach, UPS is finding ways to see third party cookie loss as an opportunity to evolve. Gearing towards being more customer centric, UPS is focusing on the first party data they already own to gain a deeper understanding of who their customers are and how they can further accommodate them.
Look for New Tools to Support the Shift Away from Third Party Cookies
Emily Wilson, a member of the Partnership team at Meta, urged participants at DV to consider other tools to recuperate the power that companies are losing with the loss of third party cookies. As it usually goes, innovation comes when a need is created and Meta, in cahoots with Tealium, is working on new tools to progress your company’s martech arsenal.
“Because of the loss of third party data, we feel this very strong sense of urgency around helping advertisers get more reliable and secure ways to share their data that happens outside of Meta with Meta. That’s why we’ve developed a product called Conversions API that we worked on very closely with Tealium.”
– Emily Wilson, Product Growth and Partnerships Leader at Meta
Companies like Tealium and Meta have the internal expertise and resources to create new tools to help make the transition away from third party cookies a smooth one. Knowing how you want to use your data and what your company’s end goal is will make it easier to identify the tools you need to optimize your martech stack for the cleanest and best first party data strategy.
Bring Your Data In-House to Maximize Your Data Investment
Highlighted in our Ultimate CX Healthcare Event, Drew Isaacs, the Vice President for Marketing Operations at Novartis, shared how Tealium is helping Novartis shift to a focus on first party data.
“There are some other technologies out there that try to help solve for third party cookie loss, but at the end of the day, the more we can move away from paid media and [focus on the] things that we own and serve right is best. We’re working with our media partners to be able to connect where people are coming from, and how we identify the customer on our side when they come to our own properties. We are using Tealium to connect those dots now.”
– Drew Isaacs, the Vice President for Marketing Operations at Novartis
Many companies previously reliant on third party data are now shifting their focus to data governance and a first party data strategy using tools they own so they never lose their data – one of the big concerns with third party cookie loss. Investing in your own data through your own tools allows you to have confidence that your data investments will still have worth in the future, and will even grow in value as you are able to continuously organize and optimize your data quality and insights over time for greater activation.
Third party cookie loss demonstrates just how important it is to focus on futureproofing. The world of technology is constantly changing and having the ability to change with it is vital. Owning and using your own first party data is something that you will never lose and thus learning how to properly utilize it will only aid you in the future. Having a Martech tool like Tealium’s CDP positions you to have a cleaner and deeper understanding of the data you are constantly collecting for both current and future use.
For more information on how to prepare for the future of customer data, check out our eBook (partnered with Meta) “The First-Party Future of Marketing” and our “2022 State of the CDP Report”.
