First-Party Data is the Wave of the Future

December 31, 2017

Earlier this week, Adexchanger published an article about Oracle's shift away from its third-party data services. This is a major story given the amount of market share they command in this space; they are the parent company of major industry players like BlueKai, Datalogix, Moat, AddThis, and Grapeshot, who were all brought on in the last few years.

These companies became part of Oracle through massive acquisition deals, with Datalogix being purchased for $1.2 billion and Moat being purchased for a similarly large sum of $850 million. To see Oracle flip its strategic focus just 5 years after acquiring all of these companies may be shocking, but it speaks to the rapidly changing nature of the digital advertising world.

To understand why this has happened, we have to look at the pitfalls of third-party data. Its biggest issues are limited accuracy and reliability and price. Because it comes from aggregators that pull huge sums of information, it doesn't always reflect the most recent behaviors of individuals who are being targeted, especially with the lightning-quick purchase windows of some products.

For example, consider someone who has been identified as interested in washing machines by a third-party data provider. If this person was placed in that audience bucket months ago and purchased a washing machine the next day, they would no longer fit the target audience and the third-party data would be inaccurate, leading to wasted impressions and ad spend.

With the ability to collect data internally as well as go to second-party data onboarding services, using first-and second-party data is also much cheaper than purchasing third-party segments from major aggregators. In addition to Oracle, Facebook is another tech industry titan who has cut third-party data from its offering in the past year, as they hope to have more control over the data that brands are using to run campaigns.

GlassView's video distribution platform makes us an excellent partner for leveraging first and second-party data. Our publisher-direct partnerships that give us access to highly accurate, cost-effective information that we can use to reach your audience, no matter how niche.

Our publisher network also gives us access to 98% of the connected United States, so if you want to run a reach campaign with strong performance, we can help you with that too. On top of that, we can integrate with a number of verification partners, including Moat, IAS, and DoubleVerify, to confirm that our targeting is helping your brand reach the right audience.

We take a managed service approach to campaign delivery, building out a targeting grid and constantly optimizing toward the best-performing segments throughout the campaign. In a landscape with questions around audience data accuracy and return on ad spend, working with GlassView's first and second-party data blend will leave you confident that you are getting both of these things.