What mistakes are marketers making by investing in first-party data strategies?

First-party data strategies can backfire without privacy considerations. Graham Mudd, SVP of Product at Anonym (Mozilla), shares his expertise at the intersection of analytics and privacy-preserving advertising technology. He explains the middle ground between oversharing customer data and being too conservative with valuable first-party information, while exploring how synthetic data and AI-driven approaches can maximize targeting effectiveness without compromising user privacy. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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  From advertising to software as a service to data, across all of our programs and clients, we've seen a 55% to 65% open rate.

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  Getting brands authentically integrated into content performs better than TV advertising.

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  Typical life span of an article is about 24 to 36 hours.

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  If we're reaching out to the right person with the right message and a clear call to action, then it's just a matter of timing.

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  Welcome to the Martech Podcast, a member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. In this podcast, you'll hear the stories of world-class marketers that use technology to drive business results and achieve career success. Here's the host of the Martech Podcast, Benjamin Shapiro.

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  I'm Benjamin Shapiro and joining me today is Graham Mudd, the SVP of Product at Anonym, which was recently acquired by Mozilla. And today Graham is going to explain how privacy preserving technologies can actually improve your targeting results. All right, let's move on to our last question. What mistakes are marketers making by investing in first-party data strategies?

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  Look, I think investing in first-party data strategies make a lot of sense. So I wouldn't say, don't do that. That's a mistake. I think that's actually a way for you to control your destiny. I think when you don't have that and you're just relying on, I'm going to use the platforms and all of the data that they collect and just try to find users based on their data, you're sort of outsourcing your future in a lot of ways. So first off, I would say, keep it up in terms of investing in first-party. I'd say there's kind of a mistake that companies make in being too aggressive in how they use that data. So that would mean. I'm going to take data that I gathered from my customers, who presumably you really value, and sharing it broadly in ways that disturb them and violate their expectations and their trust and so forth. So that's obviously not good.

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  And then I think there's also the opposite side of the coin, which is folks who are being overly conservative in the sense that, look, I've got all this valuable data about my customers, but they didn't give me permission to share it, and so I guess I just can't use it. And I think there's a middle ground here, which is I'm going to find the way to use the data assets that I have that doesn't require me to share, but does allow me to utilize that goldmine. That's, I think, the key. But you can make a mistake going too far or not far enough.

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  Yeah, it's funny. I thought your answer was going to be how much data you actually need. There's the rise of this notion of synthetic data and all the artificial intelligence that we're able to use now, where, as it turns out, you don't have to have first-party data on everyone and have that much data to really have a valuable data set. Give me a couple of thoughts on the rise of synthetic data and how much data marketers should prioritize as collecting first-party datas or just exploding their first-party data into a larger data set.

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  Synthetic data approaches are interesting. I, to be honest, have not seen one in practice where I've seen data that really proves that it works. But in theory, I can certainly believe it. I think the important thing, though, to recognize is anything that is using AI or ML, which are basically the same thing in a lot of ways, it requires training data, right? You have to have a true set if you want to even develop synthetic data. So if your point is, look, I don't have to have data on every potential customer out there, which would mean going out and buying data for non-customers, I'm completely with you. I totally agree. But if you want to train a model or develop synthetic data, you have to have some understanding of what a good customer looks like based on reality,

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  based on this person bought something from me and it cost this much and they came back two weeks later and bought again. You've got to have the true set. How big that is, is dependent entirely on how big of an audience you want to create or how big of a customer set you're going after. Again, comes back to sort of this notion of is this a niche product? Or is this a broad appeal product? Those are going to require different scales of trading data.

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  I think about the privacy-friendly approach to advertising and my head is in two different camps. As a marketer, I'm terrified. I want access to my data. I want to be able to find my customers and target them and track them around the internet. And it's just the methodology I'm used to. And on the consumer side, I believe in privacy and protection and I don't want my data out there readily available for everyone to sell to me, or even worse sometimes. So I think that what you're doing is technically very interesting and also very valuable to real people who care about how their data is served. So tell us a little bit about how anybody who's interested in the platform can get ahold of you or learn more.

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  Sure. Our website, you can find us there, anonymousco.com. You can do a search for us on LinkedIn, reach out there. You can send me an email, [email protected], any of the above. We love talking about this stuff. And even if it's just, I want to learn more. I'm not going to be a customer. I want to learn because I see this coming in the future and I want to get ahead of it. We're totally here. A big part of why Mozilla bought us was certainly the commercial opportunity, they're for-profit, owned by a nonprofit, but also because they care about changing the way the web works in ways that are really focused on people as opposed to profit. A big part of our mission is to affect that change, not just make money. So we love talking about this stuff.

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  Well, thank you for coming on the podcast and thanks for sharing the new approach.

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  Appreciate it. Thanks a bunch.

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  All right. That wraps up this episode of the Martech Podcast. Thanks for listening to my conversation with Graham Mudd, the SVP of Products at Anonymous, part of Mozilla. If you'd like to contact Graham, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes or on martechpod.com, or you can visit his company's website, which is anonymousco.com, which is A-N-O-Y-M-C-O dot com. If you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of marketing and technology knowledge in your podcast feed, hit the subscribe button in your podcast app or on YouTube and we'll be back in your feed every week. All right, that's it for today. But until next time, my advice is to just focus on keeping your customers happy.

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  Thanks for listening to the Martech Podcast, an I Hear Everything production. Looking to launch or scale a podcast like this one for your brand? Then visit iHearEverything.com.