A wider data aperture will unlock greater campaign effectiveness. Here are 4 ways to do it.

In my last piece, I highlighted that even with Google’s course reversal on cookies, marketers and the industry have already changed to embrace a new set of realities that will continue to disrupt the value chain of digital marketing. To stay ahead and optimize toward long-term success, marketers must rethink their data approach to prioritize an ownable strategy: focusing on both reaching consumers with greater confidence and precision while mitigating the risk of an evolving ecosystem.

Advertisers can start by going wide, not just deep, mining every data signal available to extract maximum value. If the value of data lies in the action it can inform, then marketers who are overly reliant on third-party digital identifiers are missing large swaths of the internet. Instead, marketers need to leverage all the ways their brand can connect to its audience and augment any owned intelligence with everything their media partners and the open internet at large know about their customers.

Here are four ways to cast a wider data net across a spectrum of scale and accuracy, all while better balancing privacy and personalization throughout marketing activities.

1. Collaborate, don’t just collect

Where achieving marketing objectives requires precise media investment — for example, in demand conversion, customer retention, and lifetime-value strategies, or in highly regulated industries with sensitive data use restrictions — privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) are at the top of the martech wish list for many brands. It’s up to agencies and partners to help marketers ease the operational burden of privacy-conscious consumer data activation through a multi-tenant, neutral clean room strategy — a “network” of clean rooms — where templatized targeting, measurement and optimization use cases can be applied consistently. This approach allows marketers to apply the aggregate insights found across clean rooms to the entirety of media and advertising optimization decisions.

2. A “universe” of IDs

Universal IDs provide a privacy-conscious alternative to deprecating digital identifiers. Unfortunately, the hype of “one ID to rule them all” has faded amid the proliferation of choice, low ID absorption rates, and rising walls enabled by PETs. Embracing data collaboration plus the multitude of identity solutions available creates opportunity for flexibility. Owning the identity strategy means reducing reliance on one single provider, and clean rooms offer the piping for rapid match-rate testing and activation of multiple IDs against first-party data. The ability to scale addressable strategies across leading universal ID suppliers could help increase “find rates” and reclaim reach in an open-web strategy.

3. First-party models

While the value exchange of collecting names and email addresses may not be there for all brands, every brand has some owned digital footprint that leaves an exhaust of unauthenticated consumer engagement activity. From this data, we can recognize patterns and syndicate them to inform inventory selection across the open web, making more of the web “addressable.”

Unlocking this for marketers is possible by harnessing the advancements in data science, specifically federated learning, to mine anonymized, unstructured data to extract actionable insight. Marketers can train and deploy decentralized, AI-powered models that create highly scalable, predictive “audiences” without the need to collect or share personally identifiable information. Instead of bringing data to be modeled in an environment outside of your control, this approach brings the models to the data.

4. Design targetable demand moments

Not all marketers have the guaranteed advantage of, or access to, first-party data. If there are tactics in the mix for which a marketer lacks the right seed data, they should be driving relevancy through targeting demand moments, instead of audiences. This can be done by building data models that anchor actionable insight to location and time, not people. These scored and segmented “geo-cohorts” can maximize reach and effectiveness, even when the individual on the other end of the impression is unknown. Why geography? Because it’s a universal key for media activation and a proven measurement design construct for incrementality testing.

Access to the right combinations of data, interpreted and applied at speed, through a flexible activation model, can help ensure advertising dollars continue to drive meaningful connections with consumers through smarter, more predictive experiences. That’s widening the data aperture to fuel sustainable business growth.

This op-ed represents the views and opinions of the author and not of The Current, a division of The Trade Desk, or The Trade Desk. The appearance of the op-ed on The Current does not constitute an endorsement by The Current or The Trade Desk.