Media Monday

The Future of Leveraging First-Party Data?

By: Diego Diaz, Media Buying Supervisor

If this is the first you read about the importance of First-Party Data this Monday morning, we would be shocked. It’s a Marketing 101 message that’s echoed often from all angles of the marketing and advertising industry. Our inboxes are overflowing with subject lines from partners that offer options to better leverage owned data. Following Ad Week tech sessions, it’s not a surprise to note the mention of this valuable information that’s available to all brands dozens of times per topic.?

First-Party data comes in many forms. Personal Identifiable Information (PII) lists of customers who have shown interest in the brand by supplying their contact information via lead generation campaigns, consumers who have transacted or have begun transactions, and profiles or accounts that link customer contact information to an identity are some examples. Another source of first-party data comes from website tracking tools like pixels that collect data from website activity. A site visit, a link click, and transactions are examples of signals pixel can send to advertising platforms that leverage identifiers like IP addresses, device IDs, and operating systems to name a few. Most if not all of brands have some form of customer data that it should be leveraging but that is also likely very valuable to other brands and organizations.

The success of a brand’s marketing efforts lies in an organization's ability to fully realize the potential of their owned data.

One brand stuck out at AdWeek in its advances in plans to utilize owned data: the global airline United. They present a powerful case for the granularity of identity that they had available to them with multiple meaningful customer touchpoints. United travelers have a planning phase researching trips - potentially on their United app, the booking experience when they purchase a ticket and become confirmed travelers, the pre-flight experience in a MilagePlus Lounge, the traveling phase that has a legal requirement to hold a manifest of passengers and where they’re seated, and post-traveling when a consumer might be looking for things to do in a new area. Each phase is an opportunity for United to make their consumer experience tailored and appropriate for each unique customer.?

Leveraging their abundance of first-party data, United has a plan to become a unique media network . Their offerings will soon become available to advertisers who value a traveler’s complex multi-step journey. Mike Petrella, an ad tech professional who became managing director of strategic partnerships at United, noted the in-flight experience as a perfect opportunity of unique focus from a consumer. A traveler is sitting in the same spot for an average of a few hours with little option to stand up and walk away from a video commercial that’s shown during in-flight entertainment. This is a home-run for any company’s marketing strategy in time when there is so much competition on a consumer’s most valuable asset: their attention.?

SAG-AFTRA Inks Deal to Regulate Use of Generative-AI Celebrity Likeness in Advertising?

By: Dan Magan, Executive Director of Optimization & Measurement

According to a 2024 Gartner survey , almost 90% of the marketers they talked to are either already using generative AI in their advertising campaigns or are planning to in the next 12 months.? 32% of respondents are already using it for search and ad optimization.

They’re reporting positive results, too.? Progressive Insurance produced 2x incremental lift in prospects seeking insurance quotes with synthetic AI voice and generative AI content over a control group being exposed to no advertisement.? (They did not report here any lift over being exposed to more mass-appeal ‘traditional’ ads.)

The use of generative AI celebrity likeness in advertising and entertainment has picked up some early negative coverage.? The late Robin Williams’ family, Tom Hanks and Scarlett Johannson have each found themselves entangled in unauthorized use dust-ups in the last year and called for some kind of regulation and guardrails around this use of the technology.

Further, the writers and actors guild strikes in 2023 each had different variations of AI use regulation as central issues.

We’re now starting to see some early-stage evolution in how generative AI can be managed when it comes to celebrity likeness.

In August, SAG-AFTRA announced a deal that will allow its members to license and control the use of their likeness.??

The agreement, with Narrativ.ai , a marketplace that connects talent with advertising agencies and allows talent to broadly and proactively describe the way they’d allow their likeness to be used/portrayed, and to individually sign off on each use of their likeness.??

While this sort of use case is sure to keep evolving, this deal will allow talent to retain control over their image and likeness and to be transparently compensated for its use …both today, as well as beyond the point where they may be able or willing to actively participate in this kind of work.

In addition to how it’ll treat more-established professionals as described above, it can also act as a way into the advertising for others at earlier parts of their careers.

It’s far too early to know if this model will survive or how it will change, but it’s encouraging to see the industry moving to find practical and ethical ways of taking advantage of this technology.?