To wrap up 2023, Mediaweek is looking at the biggest trends, events, platforms, and brands of the year.
Welcome to Mediaweek’s A to Z of 2023 … and beyond.
By Richard Knott, general manager of Australia and New Zealand at InfoSum
As the saying goes, ‘the only constant in life is change’, and this is certainly true when it comes to consumer data.
We’ve known changes to the regulatory privacy landscape have been coming to Australia for some time, with the wheels set in motion five years ago with the GDPR in Europe. We kicked off the year with the Privacy Act’s 116 recommendations, which set off ripples of applause, consternation, or schadenfreude depending on where people sat in the industry. This was swiftly followed by the ACCC announcing it would investigate ‘data brokers’, to better understand their practices. Then the Australian Government published its response to the Privacy Act recommendations, accepting 38 of the 116 recommendations and accepting “in-principle” (meaning more discussion needed) a further 68, and “noting” (that is, rejecting) 10.
We will soon see the details of how these Privacy Act amendments will play out, but either way, it’s clear we are in the midst of a profound paradigm shift within data and identity. Tightened regulations and the deprecation of the third-party cookie (surely it will happen this year!) mean we’re moving to a new world of first and second-party data collaboration; a world with control and privacy at its core.
Data collaboration is a process of bringing together data from various internal and external sources to unlock combined data intelligence. These valuable insights can be used to create new products and services, power richer customer experiences, and deliver better business outcomes.
Brands looking to access insights and opportunities beyond those provided by their own first-party data can utilise data clean rooms like InfoSum to build second- and third-party private networks. These collaborations enable brands to deepen their understanding of current customers and unlock scale through affinity and propensity modelling; it’s a powerful way to discover new information that can inform the customer experience.
Similarly, we’ll see the continued rise of retail media networks as they can augment and expand a brand’s own data capabilities in a privacy-first manner. A retail media network unlocks the power of first-party data by fostering collaboration among brands, data providers, media owners, and retailers. They typically offer exceptional on-network (owned) and off-network media buying opportunities, all measured with their own point-of-sale transactional data to close the loop. This can deliver benefits to everyone in the exchange. The consumer receives discounts and rewards for their data, the media owners within the Retail Media Networks will receive higher CPMs for their inventory as it will be supercharged by first-party data, and advertisers will see greater sales, all measured by the strongest form of attribution, point-of-sale data.
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Top image: Richard Knott