As cookies decline in relevance and companies build out their first-party data approaches, organizations need clear data collection, maintenance, sharing, and targeting strategies. “Disparate data is going to lead into a fragmented view of customers, and that will make a broken experience,” said Moitree Rahman, senior director of first-party strategy at Eli Lilly & Company, speaking at our EMARKETER Summit.
Companies need management strategies that will keep their data healthy. That involves prioritizing privacy and bringing data into one place.
“Brands of today and tomorrow are built through the delivery of personalized consumer experiences,” said Echo Sandburg, Chief Brand Officer at CP Skin Health Group.
Collecting data for those experiences means tackling changing approaches to acquiring, maintaining, managing, and mining data in a privacy-safe manner. That means being transparent with policies, making opt-in and opt-out simple, and making privacy policies readily available, Sandburg said.
Organizations also need to make sure data is available to everyone who needs it. “It’s not just getting permission to use that data, it’s also getting access to all the data that you have,” said our analyst Yoram Wurmser. “The bigger an organization, the more siloed the data can become.”
“Promoting a culture of data sharing and collaboration is also very important” within an organization, Rahman said. Customer data platforms (CDPs) are instrumental in building audience targeting and personalization tactics because they put consumer data all in one place, Rahman said. That said, companies need to make sure they’re consistently collecting data across the company before data even gets to a CDP.
AI could make organizing and surfacing consumer data easier. The variety of qualitative and quantitative data makes it hard to respond quickly in order to meet customer demand. LLMs will help sift through that data in order to personalize marketing campaigns and improve return on investment, said Rahman.
And with generative AI making complex data sets easier to understand, more people at the company could interact with and take action based upon that data, said Wurmser.
Though third-party cookies may not go away, organizations can’t rely on them. Both Rahman and Sandburg said they are prioritizing zero- and first-party data despite the lifeline third-party cookies got earlier this year. “It does relieve some of the concerns regarding the immediate future, but ultimately it doesn’t change too much for us,” Sandburg said.
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