With access to the right first party data, marketers and advertisers can start to plan their way forward as the country prepares to ease some of the lockdown restrictions over the coming months, writes Richie Kelly, CEO of Packed:House.
As our industry tries to navigate our way through these unchartered waters I think it is interesting to look at how our Government and the National Public Health Emergency Team are relying on the data provided by the Health Protection Surveillance Centre to help them steer our collective course. The 5-stage roadmap announced by Leo Varadkar last week will be completely dependent on how those daily data reports measure up versus expected trends.
Could brands also follow a similar approach and if so, how could publishers help? Could publisher first party data be the North Star for brands? According to Mary Meekers Covid-19 report “Events of the past 3-4 months underscore the need for broadscale data-driven forward planning and execution.’’
Our Data Centric Approach
Before we get into how publisher data could play a role for brands it is probably useful to explain how Packed.House uses our first party data. We fully respect the privacy of our users and 95% of our audience have consented to us analysing their interests and intent behaviour on our platforms for commercial activity. Our purposeful, expert led content is seen as a fair value exchange by our communities.
On average 2 million Irish users rely on the content published on entertainment.ie, beaut.ie, FamilyHriendlyHQ.ie and TheSportsChronicle.com every month. We could not manually analyse all this behaviour and intent data, so we have invested in a Data Management Platform to help us with editorial and commercial uses cases.
Brands will have to reassess their current focus on highly standardised creative, shifting to more tailored customer interactions that respond to the unique and evolving needs of individual customers or buyer personas.
Publisher data will help with this — giving more real-time, data fuelled insights into each buyer persona. This will enable brands to tailor their creative and deliver a greater return on investment. In a recent survey carried out by IAB brands mentioned they were experiencing huge uncertainly in what messages to advertise. Using publishers as partners to listen to what your customers wants and then communicating that to them could give brands more confidence in their messaging. We have an insights and research team that can run highly targeted real time surveys for brands with our audiences. This will allow them to measure sentiment pre-campaign and test creative assets on closed user groups before campaigns launch.
The recent IAB Brand survey also showed that 11% of brands stated that the cost of digital creative will be a barrier to them returning to active advertising. We have just launched Packed.Studio as a separate division within Packed.House. We can provide affordable digital creative display, rich media, AR/VR and video production to brands that are challenged with budgets. Most importantly we can use our publishing data to inform the creative direction. ‘No ideation without insight’ is the Packed.Studio mantra. We can create multiple versions of the creative and target specific creative at users who have shown behaviour and intent. The right message will go to right audience in real time
We recently ran an online survey on online grocery shopping with entertainment.ie users. Nearly 6.5K users opted in to complete the survey within 48 hours. From this we were able to create seed audiences for our brand partner based on responses and target creative messages accordingly. We were then able to expand those seed audiences to cohorts, or groups of users, that had behaved similarly to the seed audience. This created the scale that the brand needed. Google and Facebook have provided solutions like this for years. With our DMP in place we can now compete effectively with them on brand safe trusted platforms.
Publisher first party data can provide quantifiable benefit to brands, it will not be the only tool you will need to traverse the next 3, 6 and 9 months but it should be an essential part of the media mix. With Google announcing their intention to phase out third party cookie tracking over the next two years brands need to develop their own first party data strategy. We all should trust in reliable data to guide us through.
If you would like more information on Publisher Partnerships with Packed.House and Packed.Studio, please join us for a co-hosted webinar with guest speakers from our DMP partner Permutive on the 21st of May. Contact richie@packed.house for more information.
