I'll show you my data, if you show me yours

Back home in sunny Los Angeles and reflecting on what went down in Barcelona. And no, I'm not referring to the Ibérico ham or sangria.

Mobile World Congress (MWC) is held annually in Barcelona and is an established global conference primarily serving telecommunications companies, handset and device makers, software companies, equipment providers and internet companies. It's a huge event serving an even larger industry.

Across the massive 8 halls is a ton of companies that are innovating to bring us the best experience, fastest connectivity, secure communications and a new way to engage with content and the brands that support it.

Through my own lens there was a lot of people there to buy and sell data. This is the data that we as consumers agree to share with companies directly and indirectly. This typically happens when we hit "accept" on various things like setting up a Facebook profile, Gmail address, updating your iPhone software, downloading Apps and reading the news on your local newspaper's mobile site. Much of this data is duplicated, enhanced through adding context, packaged and sold to companies looking for a competitive advantage. The terms our industry loves is deterministic and 1st party data. But, let's just consider that for a minute.

Deterministic data is a 1:1 matching of various data sets, based on unique identifiers. This is most likely data provided directly by the consumer like email addresses, mobile numbers, credit card numbers and names. This is considered to be Personally Identifiable Information (PII), and would allow marketers to find consumers based on their PII.

Probabilistic data is less accurate, but typically accesses other data linked to deterministic data to draw a relationship. This might include cookies, deviceIDs, household income, location data, purchase data and content behavior. This is considered to be anonymous and non-PII, and rolled up to find look-a-like profiles, aspiring to a high match rate.

Most companies buying or selling data are trading probabilistic data today.

A man who is an authority on the topic of data is Larry Ellison. And in early 2016, I saw Larry give a keynote where he provided definitions of data. Broken down it goes as follows:

• 1st Party Data - What your customers share uniquely with you.
• 2nd Party Data - What partner companies uniquely know about its customers and share with your company.
• 3rd Party Data - Customer data aggregated from many sources and refined for sales.

Most companies buying or selling data are trading 3rd Party data today. 

So how do you get 1st Party deterministic data? Trying to match people across all of the platforms in which they consume content through media is hard. Really hard. Deterministic data is often enabled through a login, or secure gateway where you must identify your credentials to gain access. Examples on mobile include logging into Spotify, Netflix, Facebook, Amazon, Bank of America, LinkedIn, Snapchat, HBO GO, Gmail, etc. 

For many of us, we use a host of other services to get our daily news, weather, traffic information, pass time playing games, watch silly videos with our kids, get the latest sport scores, and keep up to date with entertainment and gossip. The companies providing these services might not know your name, but they are learning what you like. Many of them want to make the experience more sticky, so you come back or spend more time, so they enhance their dataset on you and often sell that expanded view to their advertising partners who are effectively keeping the content free. This is the advertising value exchange we are mostly familiar with. However in mobile, we have other information at play. The most lucrative of them is location. There are two common ways today to collect that:

1. The App or site has requested access to your location and you have agreed to share it. Most likely when you downloaded the App. And you can always turn it off. The publisher of that content can pass on that location data to their advertising partners and those partners can keep that information to also learn about your behaviors and create a profile.
2. Your phone can communicate with sensors in the real world, like beacons, NFC tags, Wi-Fi access points, etc. This might be referred to as the Internet of Things (IoT), or now, the Internet of Everything (IoE). Here you would have agreed to connect via accepting another opt in with an App (beacons), held your phone proximate to another device (NFC) or accessed the internet over a non-carrier connection (Wi-Fi). The stakes on having the most robust data capabilities are indeed very large. Brands are investing heavily in this future. This could be in establishing a Data Management Platform (DMP) and/or instructing their media agency partner to collect data from their digital media partners. And not all data is created equal. The expertise required to understand are not only rare but extremely valuable. Yet our industry is about growth and scale. So there are many areas where we fall short. Over time this will change, but not overnight. 

My advice to any marketer is to spend the majority of your 2017 planning your data strategy. This should be something that considers the next 5-10 years. There is no way to simplify it. And buying media from companies that promise to have access to people across all platforms is not a strategy. This is efficiency in executing today. And should merely be a function of activation, according to your long term data strategy. There are platforms that only serve a single media. And do it well. Take advantage. Feed your DMP. Learn the nuances of consumer behavior, and how it is evolving. Adjust for context and content. Think about how your brand is experienced on these platforms and the creative vehicle that you can leverage that feels more native to the experience (hint: it is not 30-second pre-roll TV ads).

And be ready to constantly adapt. If you do this well, you will be able to protect and grow marketshare, and be right there with your customer through all levels of the consideration process. And those competitors that didn't plan, or chose the easy route today will be left behind to make way for new competitors who will be looking to challenge your marketshare in the future. Don't. Stay. Still. Evolve.