How brands can grab more crumbs of first-party data in a post cookie-less world

With farewells being bid to third-party cookies, businesses are on the hunt for fresh approaches to engage and connect with their target audiences. Adapting to the growing demand for privacy, security, and greater control over personal data presents a formidable challenge for marketers.

In a panel discussion at ad:tech 2024 titled ‘Ways To Grow First Party Data,’ industry leaders tossed around various ways their brands tried to grab onto first-party data, as a cookieless world does not translate to a dataless world.

Ruchira Jaitly, Chief Marketing Officer, Diageo India, shed light on how first-party data is content-driven for her brand category (that is not legally allowed to advertise) and that consumer experiences and engagement are key to gaining first-party data.

“Consumers share information with the brand as they derive some value from the content and experiences we offer to them” she justified, admitting that though the exchange may not be monetary or transactional, it builds a lifetime value that the brand can utilise to create something that's really powerful.

For Priyanka Gandhi, Director - Integrated Brand Experience Lead at Colgate-Palmolive (India), first-party data collection (as a FMCG brand) is reaped through solving specific people's problems. The focus, she remarked, has been on solving that particular problem and building further engagement based on it.

“For us, we focus heavily on personalisation and, in return, get better interactions and build better experiences,” she added.

When asked to cite the client’s side of this narrative, Narin Shetty, Group President, Valueleaf Services (India) shed light on the segmentation of the acquired data that his agency does. Data, he remarked, is a goldmine, and too much data, if not properly used, could go to waste.

Shetty’s funda for three tier data segmentation is placing traffic, visits or engagement in tier 1, placing leads in tier 2, and non-converted leads in tier 3.

Gazal Bajaj, Head- Media Management, Nestle, called it a journey to track first-party data and extract the sales potential out of it. Immediate activation of data and attributing brand measure to it is what this journey thrives on, according to her.

Talking about regulations running their course while collecting first-party data, Jaitly opined that organisational philosophy needs to drive the collected first-party data and that the brand gets to decide how to utilise the data collected.

She also shed light on how such data collection is an omnichannel journey based on what the customers are sharing their data for—newsletters, emailers, future offer reminders, etc.—which drives the kind of experience a brand gets to deliver.

Another important aspect of such data collection is the privacy sphere of who gets to handle it, for how long, and how it gets handled.

Talking about success measurement based on such data, Gandhi elucidated three key metrics the brand follows. One is quality data acquisition, second is harnessing the data to understand consumers better; and the third is activating it at scale to get results.

She remarked, “The northstar for such data is how we start using it to impact business and brand metrics.”

Shetty added to the key metrics to be considered and shed light on the importance of converting the traffic to active leads and challenging one’s content to bring more conversions.

Bajaj broke the common assumption that every customer touchpoint could be a source of PII (Personally Identifiable Information). “And hence, over and above the product, what's the value exchange that you can have with the consumer has become extremely important as a conversation,” she added.

Shantanu Chauhan, Director Marketing, Noise, who was the moderator of the discussion, painted a summarised picture by illuminating the importance of brand experience, brand tracking, and measurement, and concluded the discussion with the insight that collecting first-party data involves a lot of measures that are both product-centric and customer-centric.

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