Let’s say you’re tired of shoveling all that snow, and it’s time to buy a snow blower. You hop online and start visiting a few home improvement store websites, read reviews on a home magazine’s site, and compare prices across a few local big box stores.

You finally find your perfect snow blower and are glad the search is over. You go to the store, pay with a credit card, and excitedly bring home your new snow blower. 

Your snow blower helps perfectly with the onslaught of snow but does little to stop the onslaught of snow blower ads that inundate your screen. For weeks following your purchase, you continually get ads for snow blowers because it’s all over your browsing history. 

It’s as if the snow blower sellers didn’t even realize you made a purchase. The ads become a bothersome nuisance and a constant cringe-worthy reminder that advertisers have no clue, often resulting in hurting a brand’s reputation.

This scenario plays out repeatedly for whatever the product or service is and only leads to frustration for advertisers and buyers. The advertiser isn’t connecting its data points of purchasing behaviors and cannot identify its consumer prospects and buyers. 

But companies that can make progress at the crossroads of advertising, data and media will gain a fuller picture of individual consumers that can be leveraged and monetized.

What is happening with data and media

Publishing companies are soon facing the loss of Google Chrome’s third-party cookies support, which will most likely stop by the end of 2024. Without those cookies, it will be harder for publishers to gather user data, sell targeted segments to advertisers, and deliver on personalization.

Publishers will have to rely more on their first-party data, which is facing multiple challenges from growing data privacy regulations from Apple as well as increasing U.S. state-level and federal legislation. 

The Interactive Advertising Bureau’s State of Data 2022 Part II: Preparing for the New Addressability Landscape report stated, “As updates to California’s privacy law take effect, new laws come online in Colorado, Virginia, Utah, and Connecticut, and more states and international bodies roll out new legislation, marketers are being forced to reimagine their data strategies, along with their overall customer relationship management ecosystem.” 

With this in mind, publishers are taking steps to ensure that first-party data is a crucial pillar of their ad sales strategy. A study by DoubleVerify of senior decision-makers in publishing and advertising about the post-third-party cookie advertising landscape found that:

• Over three-quarters (76%) of advertisers said they would only directly partner with publishers who have robust first-party data to leverage in support of a campaign. To collect this first-party data asset, 82% of publishers are investing in subscription models.
• A majority of publishers (64%) believe that cookie depreciation and other privacy-related changes will actually increase revenue. In part, this could be attributed to the fact that it will likely promote more direct relationships with advertisers.
• Publishers expressed interest in several solutions to the loss of cookies, including turning to private marketplaces (45%), first-party data (40%), and contextual targeting (34%).

Why CDPs are media’s answer to data challenges

Possessing customer data is the first step for publishers. The second is ensuring that the data is high quality, robust, and unified. Otherwise, advertisers are going to run into that snow blower situation where they are just wasting impressions and losing value with customers.

From a strategic and data perspective, publishers should assess the data they have on their customers. You should look at the interactions with your customers and if you have the capabilities to see and understand those interactions. Then you should be able to bring those interactions together from across disparate systems to fully understand individual customers. 

You have probably heard the term customer data platform (CDP) thrown around a lot lately. But have you ever stopped to consider how a CDP could benefit your data strategy?

A CDP encompasses the data of all the interactions with your brand – from in-store to online. Salesforce’s Customer Data Platform creates a single source of truth of rich customer data so publishers can deliver hyper-personalized engagement to advertisers across their properties. 

According to the Salesforce State of Marketing report, marketers expect a 40% increase in the number of data sources they use in the next year. A core strength of CDP is the ability to consolidate and segment customer data into a unified customer profile. 

This unified profile also helps resolve some of the data privacy issues by better understanding audiences as individuals and linking identity with privacy compliance. CDP includes privacy tools that protect data and manage customer consent using embedded capabilities and alliances with identity and consent software providers.

Level up data with Salesforce Genie

Once you have the foundational elements set with CDP, the next step is to take your data and media strategy even further with Salesforce Genie. The tool builds upon CDP’s capabilities and extends the offering across Salesforce’s product portfolio, providing data unification, identity resolution, and activation. Best of all, it adds on a real-time integration layer. 

Salesforce Genie brings the power of automation, analytics, AI, data, and integration to the entire Customer 360 to create a single view of the customer across any cloud. Salesforce Genie is the world’s first real-time CRM, which means that every interaction, ad clicked, sale, and service case comes together to create a single, cleaned record for each customer profile. 

Genie paves the way for highly personalized 1:1 experiences between customers and advertisers. A single profile is necessary for publishers to compete in today’s data-centric world and identity-driven future. Because at some point, this innovative data technology capability will be the critical difference between an advertiser spending money with you versus your competition. 

How Silverline can help on your data journey

Silverline leverages insight acquired through 10+ years in the business, thousands of engagements, and real-world expertise gained across the Media and Entertainment industry, including broadcast, publishing, and agencies. From strategy and implementation to managed services, we guide clients through every phase of their journey — enabling continuous value with the Salesforce platform. Find out how we can help your media organization.