Data: The Emergence of Marketplaces
Today, the greatest asset of a company is its data. Indeed, every brand is data rich, thanks to the data collected on all of its properties, digital or not (from website to mobile, through its social networks, its loyalty program, its cash data, its CRM data, etc.). Once used internally only to improve conversions, we are currently witnessing a shift in the use of data, which has become a bargaining chip and an additional source of income, through the development of data marketplace.
The evolution of the use of data
Used by brands to better understand their customers and serve them better, data is obviously used to sell more, sell better, but also to identify new business opportunities. But, if data has long been restricted to internal use by the company itself (apart, obviously, for those whose job is to rent / sell data), things have now changed: the emergence of data marketplaces makes it possible to generate income by offering its own data to other advertisers.
Audience Manager, the DMP of Adobe, has recently launched its own data marketplace. This marketplace, integrated with the DMP, puts in relation advertisers and content publishers and allows them to buy, sell or exchange easily data, as long as they use the same DMP.
Thus, a car manufacturer wishing to target women aged between 25 and 40 years will be able to rent audience segments from a specialized beauty player, directly within Audience Manager. If competing brands aren’t likely to do this kind of exchange, this is increasingly relevant for brands with similar audiences but on different market. It is what brands like Starwood and American Express are doing for example.
This new way to generate business opportunities and additional income completely changes the game in the digital marketing world. The first challenge is to be able to launch media campaigns always more efficient without the need to use data providers, whose future may seem uncertain. The limit is the need to share the same DMP, if we want to do it simply. But even without that, this simple possibility opens up new perspectives and reinforce even more the fundamental nature of the data, but also the need to own and know how to operate its own data.