Twenty-five years of successfully doing anything is a great run, especially in a fast-paced industry like ours. Since the 1990s, brands have used digital advertising to transform how to acquire, engage, and keep customers, taking advantage of low-cost CPMs, programmatic buying, and the massive scale enabled by third-party cookies. 

Today, the ecosystem is busily phasing out what had been the backbone of online advertising. Some say good riddance, understandably, but the fundamental truth is that data deprecation means it’s harder and more expensive for marketers to achieve the same level of performance, challenging to identify and reach your audiences, and recognizing signals has gotten spotty at best.

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Fortunately, the solution can be as simple or complex as marketers want it to be. 

Let’s start with the simple version. B2C companies everywhere are acknowledging that their customer data is their most important corporate asset and are leaning in to make the most of what they’ve got to drive growth. Many have invested in CDPs and are successfully using their first-party data to make online campaigns more relevant, more efficient, and higher performing. 

To further boost their customer intelligence, they are also enhancing and cleaning up their first-party data with third-party data sources. To make an analogy, when brands use data to see their customers better, it’s akin to someone of a certain generation (GenX in my case) putting on a pair of reading glasses for the first time. 

After many months of blatant and uncomfortable squinting, I can say from personal experience that there’s absolutely no good reason to put up with vision problems when you have tools readily at your disposal that immediately make you more productive and put you at ease. From additional demographics to financial attributes and life events, third-party data can be that insightful, that quickly, and like night and day, suddenly marketers have a clearer and more valuable view of their customers.        

Deeper customer understanding is only the first step to influencing a purchase.  

Now for a slightly more sophisticated but equally accessible solution. Once marketers have actionable insights based on a deeper understanding of customers, many choose to layer on modeled data, carefully curated to overcome additional signal loss and add dimensionality to their campaign strategies. 

By enlisting a statistical approach to predict the likelihood that people are at a certain life stage or will perform certain actions, marketers can not only find their audiences but find them in the right place, at the right time to better influence the purchase of their product or service. 

Does your audience consist of single high earners likely to live in major cities? Digitally savvy households? Likely retirees with an interest in travel? Similar to the dials on your sound system, by turning “likelihood” up and down, marketers can use these ready-made clusters or groups to find the “Goldilocks” zone between scale and reach and execute campaigns that reflect their brand’s specific business priorities and desired outcomes. 

The solution to less data is better data that starts with and centers on the customer. 

Today’s data deprecation is a dilemma of our own industry’s making. Had we begun with a more transparent method of funding the internet that created a bi-directional dialog with people, we wouldn’t have to fix it now. However, what has never changed is a brand’s success record when it invests in a customer-centric strategy aimed at creating exceptional, personalized experiences. 

The solution to having less data is having better data. Using data and predictive analytics to improve customer experience will be a key driver of customer advantage over the next five years, and creating magic moments for millions of customers, again and again, requires actionable insights powered by the right data. 

But can brands do more than use data enhancement and propensity models to fill gaps in customer intelligence? Of course. Whether it’s building a first-party identity graph to better connect data about customers, or activating audiences using cookieless solutions, Acxiom can help with that, too.