It can include things like demographics, interests, purchase history, and even location data. When used correctly, third-party data can help you create highly targeted marketing campaigns that reach the right people, not just devices with the right message at the right time, but third-party data is under threat. With the deprecation of third-party cookies and regulators cracking down on fingerprinting and third-party site tagging, brands are losing access to the data they need to power their addressable marketing and advertising campaigns. That’s where third-party data providers come in. These companies collect and aggregate third-party data from a variety of sources and then make it available to businesses in a privacy compliant way. Kyle, thoughts?

Kyle Hollaway:

Yeah, Dustin, great analogy and certainly one of my favorite movie franchises there, so thank you. Just like there are good actors and bad actors in movies, there are good actors and bad actors in the data industry. While there are many providers focused on the ethical collection, curation, and creation of third-party data assets, there are also bad actors in the industry who give everyone a bad name, especially in today’s MadTech industry with all the regulatory and privacy changes taking place, it’s particularly important to have the right third-party data provider. And speaking of which, I am excited to have with us today, one of the foremost experts in the third-party data and its ethical use. Our guest this episode is Brady Gadberry, Senior Vice President and Head of Global Data product at Acxiom. Brady and I have been colleagues for many years and I really respect his knowledge and leadership in the industry, and he is a true collaborator and an advocate for brands and partners in the MadTech ecosystem. Brady, welcome to the show.

Brady Gadberry:

Hey, guys, thanks for having me. I’m really glad to be here.

Kyle Hollaway:

So, Brady, why don’t you start off giving our listeners a snapshot of your background?

Brady Gadberry:

Yeah, I’d love to do that. I am what’s called here at Acxiom a boomerang, have a bit of a donut hole in my Acxiom career, but I started at Acxiom in 1998 on an account team, which happened to be the beta client for a product that eventually became called AbiliTec, and was a key part of the identity suite of Acxiom for a very long time. It’s where a lot of the stuff we are going to maybe talk about today was really invented at Acxiom 20, 25 years ago. So I spent the first part of my career very identity-focused. Grew up like Kyle, I got to do a tour and led global identity at Acxiom before leaving for a few years.

Spent time on the agency side working for the chief data officer at Ogilvy, and then co-founded a company that was really focused as a SaaS audience analytics, machine learning, and activation company, which we grew and exited four years later. We were acquired and then I stayed three years after that acquisition to continue growing that company. And then about a year and a half ago I was asked to come back to Acxiom to combine all of that history experience to lead data products. So I’ve had a great time back at Acxiom for a year and a half as we’ve really looked at how to create some new and interesting ways forward with our clients with data.

Kyle Hollaway:

So let’s start at the macro level, Brady, at the industry level. You were at Advertising Week this year. Tell us some of the big buzz that you heard this year across brands and agencies.

Brady Gadberry:

Yeah, I think a lot of really exciting topics we’re going on. Of course, first and foremost across everybody’s mind is all the changes that Google’s driving and the readiness or lack of readiness of Privacy Sandbox and the implications on the industry for that. They’ve made some additional announcements about what they’re doing potentially with IP address and Chrome coming and, again, following some of what Apple’s done. But most of the buzz was really about interconnected ecosystems and the way creativity and data together are driving performance for brands. So it’s a really interesting intersection between brands and agencies and tech providers and platforms and the buzz is really just about new ways to create value and connect for brands.

Dustin Raney:

Speaking of game-changing announcements, I know our very own Eugene Becker announced a new Acxiom capability that is driving towards just that, Brady, that interconnectivity called Real ID in the Cloud. Do you care to touch on that a little bit?

Brady Gadberry:

Well, yeah, I feel a little silly talking to you guys about what it is, but yeah, I was super excited to be at a panel discussion that our boss, Eugene, led and both announced and then had this great conversation with partners about Real Identity in the Cloud. As I think the three of us certainly know, and I bet all of your loyal listeners understand, everything in the data ecosystem really spins around the idea of first being able to really understand with great precision who someone is, and whether that’s in a known way or in a pseudonymous way that’s very privacy-centric. Fundamentally, if we’ve got a lot of great propensity data or transaction data or brand affinity data for somebody, if it’s not about the right person, it’s pretty useless. In fact, it’s harmful. So great identity is part and parcel to being able to create a data solution that’s really valuable for a brand. The problem is there’s been a lot of friction in that environment, largely it’s been kind of bifurcated into two pieces. There’s a people-based marketing ecosystem that’s really driven by people-based data and people-based identity.

And then there’s been this device-centric than a proxy for people ecosystem and to some degree, that splits along MarTech or AdTech lines. But people have been struggling to try to integrate both of those. They’ve each come with challenges, they’re complex, but I think what we announced and what Eugene really brought out and I thought the panelists confirmed, was there’s a real opportunity to both converge those two and simplify the narrative when you’ve got people-based identity baked directly into the clouds where everybody’s data is living these days and giving them the ability to resolve these identity issues at the place of origin. You don’t have to send it off to a third-party provider in order to do it. We’re now bringing all and you’re bringing all of that great identity resolution to the clouds and to the brands. And I think that created a lot of great buzz, not just what the brands were there, but a whole partner ecosystem that’s really forming around this idea.

Kyle Hollaway:

Yeah, I think you really pointed out a key piece there that’s underlying, which is the fact that while these ecosystems have existed now for a while and starting to take on more adoption around clean rooms or data-sharing platforms, one of the challenges that existed there is just the matching capability was fairly limited. It was really about the ability to just take a hard key or a particular column and do a match on. And really, what we’re trying to bring to the table and innovate within the market is the ability to now have your referential high fidelity match, that ability to use all of your identity signals to facilitate a match in those ecosystems where, as a brand, you’re not having to actually share out that information. So that’s, to me, one of the foundational things that we’re getting to really innovate on and bring something new to market.

Brady Gadberry:

Yeah, I think that’s what’s so exciting. People have wanted and needed to collaborate, whether that’s with their co-marketing partners, whether it’s publishers, whether it’s their measurement providers, data collaboration has been at the heart of the idea of how brands actually reach out and help customers find the brands that they want to have the best relationships with. The problem is that’s always been either this really expensive complicated thing that you needed a third-party provider and all the parties had to agree on a neutral third party to send all their data to you because they were reluctant to just pack up their customer file and share it with some partner. That was long and slow and expensive.

So all this cool clean room tech has been growing up, that’s like, “Oh, we have these data collaboration platforms.” But I think you hit the nail on the head. All of that’s only as good as the ability to actually share data. Again, the three of us fully well aware that the only way to do that is to have a robust identity spine that spans all of those so that your representation of Dustin and mine can be different and still be able to understand, “Hey, that’s the same guy that we’re talking about here,” in a way that makes those clean room spaces or those data sharing spaces actually functional at the level that people really need them to be.

Dustin Raney:

And, Brady, great points. And access to data, that alone, I feel that’s really top of mind for marketers today because they’re losing it. With, of course, Google coming in behind Apple and announcing the 2024 deadline of third-party cookie deprecation. Cookies have been kind of the proxy to accessing all of that rich third-party data on anonymous folks as they browse the internet. So what role will third-party data play in mitigating the loss of that scale?

Brady Gadberry:

I think that’s a really interesting question and the first thing I always think about when this topic comes up is, when I think about cookies or I think about this ecosystem, there’s really two big divides. There is third-party data or maybe second-party data through some kind of partner that is created or collected based on cookies in the ecosystem. And this is what most people are thinking about. They think about, “Oh, I went shopping on site X, and then everywhere I went, I went to my social feed, or I went over here and I see the same products over and over again.” And there’s certainly value in that signal, but that’s what people are thinking largely, I think, about in this.

The other role that third-party data plays in this whole ecosystem is people-based data like Acxiom’s data or others in the ecosystem where we’ve got all this really rich data that starts not connected to a device or not connected to some browser session, but starts with really ethically sourced, very tightly controlled, but use of data that originates and transaction data or originates in self-reported data or up through a third party ecosystem that starts with the person and then it goes out through the ecosystem and maybe is connected, ultimately, at its last mile via a cookie down to a browser for an ad or is connected over into a social feed or somewhere.

And there’s really, I think, a big difference about when we talk about third-party data in this and the implication of those. One of them, there’s going to be signal loss, certainly, but again, that signal loss is always proxy signal loss. That’s not necessarily at a person level. There’s still this huge set of rich third-party data that can really be predictive and help you reach really relevant customers who may be interested in a particular product or service. And the impact of cookie deprecation on that is really about how are we going to get at that last mile?

How are we going to get it to deliver it? I think there’s a whole lot of work being built around alternative currencies for identity exchange and you’ve got UID2 and you’ve got Panorama ID and you’ve got Real ID in the Cloud, and we’ve got these capabilities that are really more about if I have an authenticated user on the publisher side, on the place where I’m going to advertise, I’m going to try to reach somebody, do we have enough of the right data to be able to connect over to that?

And I think that’s a divide that we can cross and we are crossing it, but I think it’s a very different challenge than we’re talking about for the proxy data of cookies and things that are going away and the data that’s associated to those cookies and not originating from a firm basis in data about people.

Kyle Hollaway:

When we talk about all this data that you’re talking about there and associated with people and stuff, give our listeners some context around the types of data that either Acxiom is providing or that you’re just generally seeing in market and how they can leverage that in this privacy compliant ethical manner.

Brady Gadberry:

Always, we start exactly there, that you need to work with somebody who is steeped in fair information practices and the ethical sourcing of data that goes from who are the people in the ecosystem for these of where that data originates to how it’s manufactured, how it’s handled, and how it’s kept. Having a trusted partner in that is key. When we look at the different types of data, there’s thousands of different data attributes, but if I break it down, I think there’s a couple of broad categories. Some is descriptive in that we think about that as demographic data. When people talk generically about reaching a persona like a soccer mom, they’re really talking about demographics. We want to characterize and understand that we’re reaching people of a certain age and potentially of a certain income level that fit for the persona that the marketing is aligned with.

And that’s super valuable not only from shorthand, but again, it pairs and drives creative and all the other pieces that goes along with it, but sometimes the least predictive data, that descriptive data. So the next is really this data that can be really predictive about what is someone likely to be interested in. So a lot of that data comes from a couple of different places. There’s a whole large set of research data, self-reported survey data. People discuss very specifically brand preferences or affinities or where they shop, what media they consume. And from that, we use sophisticated machine learning algorithms that are also very ethically built to guard against bias in those to make predictions to say, “These are the underlying characteristics of people who answer questions these ways.” It’s very likely people who fit a particular profile might also think of that in the old saying like, “Birds of a feather flock together.”

It’s just that as the computers get smarter and faster, those get to be a little more sophisticated than just a core demographic profile for that. And then there is a whole set of data that, again, is transaction data-based. We work with folks who have very ethically sourced data relationships. Often brands or even Acxiom doesn’t see the underlying raw transaction data, but sees there were transactions and then, again, can build a model from that that says, “People with these characteristics are very likely to spend in these patterns,” which then can make for, again, a very predictive answer. So I think those are three broad categories. There’s several others. There’s stuff around, again, pseudonymous location data that can say when handled very carefully, you can see that somebody went to Wendy’s four times last week. Well, we can, again, build a model on something like that and say that people with these characteristics are likely to be somebody who’s going to go to Wendy’s.

And that can be, again, a great predictor not only for Wendy’s but for any number of other brands or as a psychographic for people who are trying to reach people who like to eat at that kind of restaurant. So, there’s lots of different data types that fall into third-party data as Dustin kicked off. Third-party data is really the catchall phrase for all data that originates outside of your own organization that you build yourself or collect yourself. So lots and lots of different types of third-party data, and in most use cases, any of them will be applicable to a brand depending on what particular challenges is sitting right in front of them.

Kyle Hollaway:

Let’s maybe not really be controversial, but let’s just approach the question that there’s a lot of noise in the industry, mainly from media pundits that are really pushing against third-party data and encapsulating in these broad stroke statements around the danger of it or that it’s going to go away, it’s going to get regulated out. What are your thoughts in that? Help our listeners, especially on the brand side, understand the value and where you see third-party data specifically playing or addressing some of those concerns.

Brady Gadberry:

I think that’s a great question. Again, as I touched on before, I think there’s a lot of misnomer about third-party data and data that’s going away. Certainly, there’ll be signal loss and data going away for data that’s collected on cookies. And if there aren’t a medium of exchange there, that will certainly change, but third-party data isn’t going away and it really shouldn’t. And here, to me, is the fundamental reason, Kyle. If I only know information about my own customers, all I can do is cross-sell and upsell. If I want to grow my customer base and reach new people who aren’t customers today who I don’t have a relationship with today, it requires third-party data.

The whole data-driven marketing ecosystem starts, and of course, is based in first-party. I understand who my customers are, I understand what makes them tick, I understand why they want to buy my products. And from that, I make a basis of an understanding that says, “Well, cool, how do I find more people that look like that?” And that’s where third-party data comes in. So if I only know something that exists within my own enterprise, then I can never go make a prediction about who else is going to be interested in my product and go reach them. And that’s where third-party data comes in.

Again, whether it’s descriptive like, “Hey, these are soccer moms, and I can go try to find them,” to the very specific of like, “Oh, I want an ethically sourced email address to reach out and drive a prospecting email campaign,” or, “I need a robust identity solution built on ethically sourced identity in order to connect into a broader ecosystem so that I can say, ‘Hey, I think this group of people might be really interested in that, and I want to ensure that that exact segment of people exists on Amazon or exists on Yahoo or exists on Facebook, exists at the trade desk for me to buy on the open internet against and send messages to the people that I think are most likely to maybe resonate with my brand message.’” If you want to grow, you have to have a third-party data ecosystem, otherwise you’re only locked into the people that you already have a relationship with. So growth requires third-party data fundamentally.

Dustin Raney:

I love that. And, Brady, thank you for such an incredible thorough explanation of the different types of third-party data that brands can have access to, but also drawing that line of delineation between first-party and third-party and the need to round out that first-party understanding of their customers. And we know that brands are starting to put their own first-party data they’ve collected about their customers straight into the cloud. And we talked earlier about access to third-party data. So, Brady, do you see as brands are starting to put their customer data, their CRM data in places like Snowflake data, these data clouds and marketing clouds like Salesforce and Adobe, there are going to be an expectation that all the third-party data is going to be accessible in the cloud platforms as well?

Brady Gadberry:

Yeah, I think so. I think it’s a movement, right? And I think it may be one where people talk about it for a long time and it hits a tipping point and then it goes incredibly fast then it’s slow, slow, slow, slow, slow, slow. Everybody’s there. But I think there is definitely a movement towards that that’s been growing over the past few years. It’s really, I think, starting to snowball into this idea of like, “I’m in Snowflake. I need you to be there. We’re making decisions around this CVP-based ecosystem. How are you going to support me there?” As things shift to the cloud, there is an expectation that cloud native solutions are more integrated and more possible. So I think that’s what’s really exciting about Real Identity in the Cloud is that, again, as I mentioned, data’s only as valuable if you can get it about the right people.

So cloud-native data strategies require cloud-native identity strategies in order to actually get the right data aligned with the right people on the other side of that collaboration. That’s why it’s been so great to work with your team around Real ID in the Cloud is that the tip of the spear in that enabling function is really that referential identity and that Real ID that comes out of that application, right? But then what are you going to do with it? Well, I’ve got a great couple of use cases for what you can do with it. You can hand that ID right back to the application and we can give you a sample of our data to test. We can give you several hundred elements based on that ID for you to go understand what are the characteristics of a segment. And that’s all part of this freemium offer or I really want to understand the full breadth of this.

So once you get that Real ID in the Cloud return, you can push that ID right back into this solution. We’ll go create 9,000 dimensions of data across a data portrait of that segment to say, across all those different types that I talked about before about purchase data or auto data, about demographic data, about health data, all the ethically sourced different dimensions that we have, whether it’s descriptive or it’s modeled propensity data, all of that available in a really easy to consume application or be able to take that identity and say, “Oh, we know this is a perfect segment for this. Let’s go try to actually reach these people out there on Amazon and being able to syndicate that and get that segment moved.” So identity really opens the door to you being able to leverage third-party data in really great ways. And I think that’s why it’s so exciting that this isn’t just an identity launch, it’s an identity launch that opens up access to data natively in the way it’s built. And I think that hooking up that trailer of data to this as it drives forward is really exciting for us.

Kyle Hollaway:

That’s awesome. The reality is, as you’ve stated, not just customer management, but growth is dependent on a strong data foundation and then identity, I view it as the rebar of the foundation. They’re inextricably mixed, right? You’ve got to have both for the strength of it because you have all these great data assets, whether first party or third party, but when they’re tied together on that rebar of identity, now you’ve got a foundation which you can really grow off of and build your business. So, I love thinking of it in that way, and I’ve crossed that and how together, cohesively, we can really advance a brand’s business.

Brady Gadberry:

Well, I think that’s great, and I think that’s exactly right. I think what’s also super exciting about this is that foundation is really, you build so much on it, right? So when I think about this identity capability, what’s cool is that my team’s been building an audience stack, an audience solution that powers our partners inside media brands and across our other partners and friends across IPG as a whole. And at the core of that has already been Real ID. So when I think about the fact that we’ve built an audience solution that has real identity at the spine, now, I didn’t talk enough about maybe the panel of the announcement of the cool partners like LG Ads and Nielsen and Snowflake who were there as well as FCV, one of our IP agency partners. And all of those solutions of addressable to connected TV are predicated on an identity spine and connections that run through this or that you take what’s so exciting, and we talked with FCV about this, is they’re no longer using proxy data to do planning for campaigns.

We can take on a single identity spine with no data movement, having a first-party segment be reflected and drive the planning process. And then when we talk about what we’ve done, and Joanne talked about from the Nielsen side, we’re also talking about taking this audience solution, and when you create an audience, being able to port that audience against the same identity spine while protecting all of Nielsen’s panelists and all of their great data by not forcing them to share their data with anybody to get on the same identity spine.

Again, all that zero data movement, privacy protection, safety that comes with Real ID in the Cloud, and yet be able to have a full end-to-end alt measurement solution that says, “I can understand this data, I can plan a campaign around it, I can execute the campaign around it, and I can share that identity spine over with a partner like Nielsen who can help us drive and understand the impact of that on the measurement side.” So when you talk about this foundation that’s like all of the cement and concrete wrapped around rebar, it really is a foundation for end-to-end solutions and provides this cohesiveness across an ecosystem that just didn’t exist before.

Dustin Raney:

Kyle, I know we ask someone at the end of these podcasts to tell us what they’re most excited about in 12 months, but, man, Brady just gave a mic drop moment right there. I’m not sure that we need anything else after that. It’s so true. It’s the full circle and identity and data are so tied to the hip, having that one ID spine that brings everything together, having it in a place that you don’t have to share or move data, and having access to all that rich profile information and not have to go through a 15-page contract getting there because you don’t have to move your data. All these things are really transformative. But since I just talked, Brady, I will go ahead and kick the mic back over to you real quick. Is there something that you haven’t already shared with our audience today that really has you excited about the next 12 months?

Brady Gadberry:

Oh, well, I think I’m excited about all the things I’ve talked about. I think for me, if it’s something we haven’t talked about, I’m really excited about what we’re doing inside Acxiom Health. It’s a little bit off of a tangent here, but I’d love the chance to plug it as well. Starting with, again, this ethically sourced data and being able to look at these really HIPAA-compliant solutions, but building very predictive models for understanding what therapies could impact different populations and creating a forum to get more targeted information and education out there. The fact is that data saves lives. We see very specifically that when we can communicate direct to consumers the benefits of a particular therapy, that more people talk to their doctors about that and more people end up on whether it’s a therapeutic regimen or a drug regimen or on something in an interaction with their doctors.

And then we see very specifically that when that happens, there are better patient outcomes. So there is this real end-to-end connection between the idea of if we can effectively get information to a group that is most likely to benefit from it by, again, having a very ethically sourced data modeled in order to help us understand, again, which people may be interested in understanding something that may impact someone in their family or someone else, and have them then be able to be better armed to have a consultation with their physician, ultimately, that leads to better outcomes. So I’m really excited about some of the new things that we’re doing in Acxiom Health and how that goes alongside and partners with all the other great work we’re doing with you guys around data and Real ID in the Cloud.

Dustin Raney:

Well, Brady, unfortunately, our time has come to an end here. What a great conversation. I know Kyle and I learned a lot, and I know our listeners have learned a lot as well, just about all the incredible things that third-party data, that Samwise Gamgee of the MarTech, AdTech ecosystem bring to brands. For all of our listeners, you can find all of our Real Identity podcast episodes at Acxiom.com/realtalk and find us on all of your favorite podcast platforms. Brady, thanks again for being here. Thanks again all you listeners, and we’ll see you again next time.