What Really Is First-Party Data?

Is a narrow definition of first-party data limiting its potential?

If you asked ten ad tech veterans what constitutes first-party data, you’d likely get ten responses that all map back to identity. From email addresses to demography, the industry’s view on what defines first-party data tends to focus exclusively on audience data. But are we missing part of the point? What about context and all of the data associated with it? Shouldn't we be paying attention to that too?

Another flavor of first-party data

At its most basic, first-party data is defined as any data a company owns. Even if the definition is broadened to data that is owned and collected directly from customers, the content a person watches on your platform or the content that is consumed is a part of that dataset. Taking that one step further, real-time, contextual metadata translates to insights that can also be another powerful signal of interest and intent for a viewer.

A modern and insightful dataset

Contextual data has come a long way since the early days of analyzing page-level text to discern context for targeting and other purposes. Search and display were the first advertising categories to benefit from technological advances that provided more insight and more specifics regarding the contextual environment. These were primarily used by marketers to avoid unsafe content and generally align with relevant pages or article environments.

Now, contextual data for video is available and it is more sophisticated, robust, and insightful than the contextual solutions that preceded it. In fact, it can actually provide deeper insight into identity than identity-based solutions.  What people watch tells you a lot about them and sight, sound, and motion data when properly normalized, analyzed, and segmented is extremely valuable. Contextual intelligence leaders like GumGum, Oracle Advertising, Silverbullet 4D, Kerv Interactive, Reticle, Comscore, and ZEFR all help to interpret video-level data to extract not only specific context but also emotional signals, object identification, logo and facial recognition, and deeper semantic understanding.

Targeting in the moment

Marketers who embrace the promise of modernized contextual first-party video-level data--surfaced directly from publishers--will benefit from the ability to identify relevant ad environments that are more closely aligned to the "in-the-moment" interests of any audience. As the video viewing experience evolves past standard show and episode categorization, so too has the data and its targeting potential.

The ad experience for video is very different from linear. Ad pods and ad breaks are becoming critical opportunities for both upper funnel and performance marketers to capitalize on viewer attention. Those context-driven moments can become first-party data points that indicate the right environment in which to serve an ad in the moment. The results of contextually aligned video ads are undeniable as research conducted by Nielsen and Turner revealed over a 30% lift in sales effect. Extracting and standardizing contextual video data lets publishers help marketers understand viewing audiences by content type and form deeper brand connections, delving beyond a specific show or video episode.

Starting now

For too long we’ve taken a shortcut to first-party data. We’ve assumed that if data told us about the identity of a viewer that was as good as it gets and what we were supposed to use to understand the audience. With the current list of 27+ universal identity solutions being proposed, we’ve been inundated with identity-based solutions. The funny thing is, none of them include one of the most basic and longest-serving data signals of all - context. That can tell us far more about a viewer and what they are inclined towards at that exact moment than any identity signal. To move the industry forward, especially in a cookieless world, it’s incumbent upon us to make room for a broader definition of first-party data - one that includes context signals too. 

Regardless of what identity-scape settles in with new parameters in place, marketers that capitalize on the opportunity to leverage publishers’ first-party contextual data and target consumers based on their interests in a given moment, rather than using a cobbled-together user profile, will reap the benefits of more precise, relevant, and higher-performing ad experiences.