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A data maturity model to help your organisation advance

Three people surrounded by monitors analyze something on one of the screens.

How your business will collect and manage data is among the most important considerations for success in the future. With the deprecation of third-party cookies and new mobile ID protection protocols impacting everyone, now is the time to improve your data practices.

To help you enhance your data collection practices, we’ve created “The digital advertiser’s guide to privacy maturity.” This eBook outlines three key areas to managing your data in a privacy-compliant way.

We’re providing this resource because every organisation now needs help understanding what they must do to deliver business results in the digital ad landscape of the future. For more detailed information on this topic, download the booklet.

Why you must evaluate and evolve your digital maturity

Simply put, you must understand your digital data practices to create better marketing programmes and build more valuable relationships with your customers. Not just that, it isn’t an option if you want your organisation to survive or even thrive in the coming years.

The pace of change in digital advertising and marketing has dramatically accelerated these last few years. More is yet to come with the deprecation of third-party cookies and the use of multiple mobile IDs. How businesses collect and manage data will be among the most important considerations for success, not just something good to do. It will become critical to your business.

“Brand and agency partners are actively testing, comparing, and migrating audience campaigns to partners who can prove they have a cookieless solution that is future-proofed, consumer-centric, and scalable,” said Joe Lyons, VP of Addressability for Brands & Agencies at LiveRamp. “There will be winners and losers when it comes to capturing premium audience marketing spend; the winners will reap the revenue and margin upside just like the walled gardens do now.”

What’s clear is that first-party data will lead the way. Your relationships with customers and your ability to communicate with them transparently and in a personalised and meaningful way will enable better marketing and advertising in the future.

These three focus areas will evolve your data privacy maturity

Ensuring you have top-notch data and privacy practices will help you create better marketing programmes and grow customer relationships in a privacy-compliant way.

Not every company or business is at the same level, and that’s okay. Everyone must reevaluate what they’re doing now and create a plan to move forward. Any organisation can go from beginner to leader and accelerate business success with a focused approach. Still, those who fail to act will be left behind.

We’ve created “The Digital Advertiser’s Guide to Privacy Maturity” to help you gauge your organisation across four levels of maturity in three focused areas. This way, you can access your organisation and see a path forward with better data practices. The four levels of maturity include:

  • Level 1: Organisations understand the impact of cookie deprecation and mobile ID protocols and are in the initial stages of building out a data strategy.
  • Level 2: Organisations are starting to arrange their data and build a value proposition for their customers.
  • Level 3: Organisations are advancing from collecting to managing and unifying data while increasing sources to second-party partners in a privacy-compliant, addressable way.
  • Level 4: Organisations use sophisticated targeting, leading to better customer insights and offline data attribution.

After evaluating your organisation’s level of digital maturity, we provide a process within the three focus areas to help you advance. These three areas are:

  • First-party data
  • Data management
  • Partners and publishers

The role of first-party data in a privacy-compliant organisation

Data has been the topic of conversation since the advent of digital marketing. But now, it’s not just an added benefit; it’s a regulated, imperative part of every marketing effort, and you must manage it correctly.

In this focus area, we explain the steps you must take to prepare for or enhance your data collection in an addressable, compliant way.

How data management establishes transparency and control

Your data management processes, roles, policies, standards, and metrics outline who can take what action, upon what data, in what situations, using which methods. It may sound simple, but having a clear understanding of the data processes is a relatively new discipline that many aren’t doing well enough.

Having good data management means allowing your entire team the empowerment to take action to put your data to use in an integrated and legally, privacy-compliant manner. In the booklet we go over the steps you can take to improve your data management.

The value of partners and publishers in enhancing your data maturity

Collecting, managing, and using data compliantly and in the best way for the business and the customer can be a complex proposition, but it’s imperative. There are no organisations that can do it all alone. Even the best among us must reach new audiences to scale their business. That’s where partners and publishers come in.

Partners and publishers are the key to helping you unlock second-party data. Not only that, they’ll help you manage data collection to application and measurement using advanced principles to create cutting edge, compliant data applications. In the booklet, we also dive into recommendations and considerations for working with partners and publishers and the importance of limiting the number of them.

Enhance your digital marketing privacy and data maturity today

There isn’t a market-ready solution available today to manage your data end to end. Each organisation must build its teams and practices to increase data maturity continually with an eye toward the future.

The time is now to ensure your teams have the best resources and information available to develop or enhance their operational data collection and management models. It’s your ability to communicate with customers transparently and in a personalised and meaningful way that will enable better relationships and business success in the future.

For now, businesses that will succeed take the necessary steps to discuss and plan for their data future. These organisations prepare a first-party data strategy, conduct robust data management, and work with the best partners and publishers. Do you?

“Consumers want both privacy and personalisation, and it’s not an ‘and’ ‘or’ situation — they can have both,” says Sarah Polli, Senior Director, Marketing Technology at Hearts & Science. “It’s essential for businesses to build trusting and transparent relationships with their users to provide them a journey that meets them where they are. Where to start? Audit your first-party data collection strategy — where do you collect it? How do you collect it? How is it stored? Who uses it? What is it used for? Just because you are collecting it today doesn’t mean you need to keep collecting. Part of building the trusting and transparent relationship with a user is only collecting data that’s necessary. More data doesn’t equate to better data.”

 Download the booklet to learn more