Third-party cookies aren’t going away any time soon, but many publishers have already reduced dependency on them as a revenue stream. As the landscape continues to shift, what should publishers looking towards the longer term be thinking of when it comes to their own data strategies, and how can various types of first-party data play a part?
This is the latest in our Media Briefs series of short, sharp sponsored episodes with a senior executive from a vendor working with publishers to make their businesses better.
In this episode we hear from Patrick Crane, Director of the Core Sales Team at BlueConic, the customer data operating system that makes your data work harder, so you don’t have to. Patrick explains the current state of the market when it comes to third-party cookies, and where it still has a place, as well as how publishers can plan their audience data strategies around industry uncertainty. He also sets out exactly what first-party data means, and how publishers should approach it as a process rather than a project.
Here are some highlights from the episode, lightly edited for clarity:
What’s going on with third-party cookies anyway
I’m both completely unsurprised and a little shocked at the way Google has launched this, the way that you might kick a laundry machine down the stairs. It did a lot of damage, and there was probably a more straightforward way to get it from level two to level one.
At the end of the day, it’s been clear that people need to adopt first-party data strategies, that has been in place. I think it’s also clear that Google is going to do what is best for Google. That’s in the reaction to Google saying, ‘Hey, we’re going to kill it…okay now it’s this date. Okay, maybe we’re not going to do it.’
What’s been lost is the fact that Safari and Firefox have already got rid of third-party cookies, so for swathes of the audience, we’re already living in a post third-party cookie world. That’s why, for a lot of folks who had first-party data strategies in place when Google made their latest redirect, nothing changed. They took a look around and said, this is still the direction we’re going. Nothing really changes about the fundamentals of what we need to do. Full steam ahead.
Asking tough questions
I think that the best revenue strategy for a media company is more of them. You have to do things that are still true to your audience, and I think a lot of times we get caught up a bit around the revenue model like, should we have a paywall? Should we do donations? Should it be metered? Should it be smart? Should we get away from advertising?
Sometimes, we go to that second order instead of going back to the first order and asking ourselves, what do we really do for our audience? Do we still have a reason to exist when cash is expensive, interest rates are up and traffic is down? Is there still real value we add to our audience?
If you’re making sure that your content can do that, great. The second step is then making sure that you’ve got multiple ways to monetise that content.
The reason first-party data has been so widely adopted is because first-party data can be applied towards anything. It creates this really wonderful flywheel where, if you have any direct consumer relationship revenue model…it throws off this beautiful exhaust of first-party data about who people are, what they care about, where they’re from… that’s the type of rich data that your advertisers normally want to target on. So you end up building the moat of your unique first party data to sustain a modern advertising business as a by-product of growing a direct to consumer business line.
First-party data as a process, not a project
I would consider first-party data the same way that you would think about email or editorial content: it’s a thing in your business that is forever. It is a process. It is a part of the institution. It’s not a project.
I’ve often compared it to launching a newsletter. There is eventually a period in which you’ve launched the newsletter, implemented the email service provider, you’ve got people signed up, the emails are flowing. Your work has not ended; really, it’s just begun. You still need to generate the content, and make it valuable, and monetise it.
First-party data strategies are the same. Don’t confuse the implementation of the technology needed to scale and support and monetise a first-party data strategy for a first-party data strategy that begins once the technology is in place.
We have to ask ourselves questions about, what are we collecting? What are we going to use it for? When are we going to go back and check, are we collecting the right things? Are we using it for everything that we could be, and are we doing so in a way that is adding to our readers, and is privacy and consent compliant?
This episode is sponsored by BlueConic, the customer data operating system that makes your data work harder, so you don’t have to. Whether it’s capturing valuable audience insights or activating them with precision, the possibilities are endless with BlueConic’s all-in-one platform.
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