Part 2: A series on managing data consent in the age of regulation (Read Part 1)
The Publisher’s data plight.
In the overlapping interconnectedness of the consumer data environment, there is one subsection of the industry that could control the entire flow of user information. Unfortunately, they’ve abdicated much of the collection, storage, and use of said user information, to vendors.
The real monetizer of consumer data is not the entity that provides the consumer value; instead it is the host of supporting characters that enable the revenue stream. The publisher, who’s content is the impetus to the collection of first party data, gets the short shrift; partly it’s due to their own use of technologies — data aggregators, tag managers, analytics, ad servers, real-time bidding platforms and more — with greater technical capability, to manage the monetization of media for them. As the first party data controller, the publisher should own more of their revenue product.
Why so much talk about data parties?
When talking about parties in data, it is shorthand to talk about who controls the data, how it is being used, and by whom in what environment. Most importantly, the party classification connotes usage rights and privacy restrictions, specifically around personal information. As the data moves along, it will get anonymized to make it harder to tie back to an individual; it will have attributes added to it; the defining identifiers will be synched across platforms and the actions that data is associated with (clicking a link, scrolling, playing a video clicking an ad, etc.) will be collected to pass back to the publisher and the marketer.
First, second and third aren’t just bases in a ball game.
Approximation of the data ecosystem.
- Blue = The Data – User visits a publisher and takes one of two paths – browses semi-anonymously (a web cookie is set) or authenticates with their email or login information.
- The Data is the human, machine (device) and browser that is collected by data platforms.
- This layer of the ecosystem is the data product that powers the entire funnel of platforms as the data flows through to use (reach) and back (measurement).
- Orange = 1st Party Data – The publisher collects the user information by setting a 1st party cookie and/or authenticating the user and connecting them to their content.
- The owner of the relationship with The Data, who sells or barters access to their environment to monetize The Data.
- They can collect and utilize personally identifiable information once a user authenticates, meaning they provide some individually defining piece of personal information like an email or username to log-in.
- Yellow = 2nd Party Data – The publishers’ partners collect user information via web pixels (code that has a variety of uses eg. setting a 3rd party cookie, collecting user actions, or supporting site functionality) and it then goes into their database tagging the user with their own unique ID signature.
- The partners of the publisher, that extract the data for service or monetary remuneration.
- These can be technology companies that extract The Data; marketing partners that will use The Data; or platforms that collect and organize The Data for the domain owner.
- Gray = 3rd Party Data – The Data — from the 2nd party data collectors — gets aggregated and anonymized as audience segments with a new ID value, translated (or synched) for use across multiple domains.
- Entities that ultimately aggregate characteristics from multiple 1st and 2nd party data sources to create audience segments that marketers will use in the ad environment.
- This anonymized data is synchronized via a Web Cookie, Advertising ID, or Universal ID to match characteristics of web visitors to derived characteristics.
- Pink = Personalized Ad Environment – The Data is recognized on a new site with its new credentials and old behavioral attributes. Those attributes and ID’s are used to identify The Data’s visitation, so a relevant or personalized ad can be displayed.
- Where The Data connects with advertisers that have platform relationships that allow them to leverage The Data’s information for marketing information.
- These sites and applications benefit, because the data makes their ad space more attractive and higher value.
The Prescription
The plight with regulation, for the publisher, is that they will no longer benefit from the 3rd party data that makes their ad space more valuable in the Personalized Ad Environment. 3rd party data via cookie transfer is under attack in a number of ways. A publisher will need to do two things they’re not usually comfortable with.
First, they’ll be required to create relationships with each other. Publishers have this assumption that their audience is special and unique. However, if they decided to augment their pool of known users, and/or enhance new and established site visitors, with attributes taken from behavior on their partners’ platforms, they’d have much greater scale of users and data points to ensure better relevance and personalization.
Second, publishers need to step up and learn how to manage their own data better. The reliance on secondary and tertiary revenue from partners, creates multiple problems. The first is data transfer. Once data has to go from one domain to another, there is natural leakage and opportunity for unsavory parties to breach the database or file share. Second, once the data becomes 3rd party data it is then subject to usage restrictions, regulations and aggregation that make it less valuable.
Lastly, the publisher has a chance to form a more lasting and trusting relationship with their customers via open dialogue about consumers’ data if they give them a choice about collection and use. Then, true data consortiums might be viable for the ecosystem to thrive with data that can be used and shared — with CONSENT! Think of that. Instead, publishers squander the opportunity to build trust and long term value (LTV) when they could thwart that with a simple conversation with the consumer.
So, the plight is one of their own making and publishers could potentially get out of their own way, if they get in the way of data collection. Not to say there aren’t benefits to 3rd party platforms but not at the expense of ownership over the entire flow of data that exists between the site visitor and the the content creator.
