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Our team recently returned from San Francisco, where we attended LiveRamp’s annual RampUp Conference. RampUp connects business leaders over topics related to the future of data-powered marketing. This year, there were over 2,200 marketers in attendance, nearing pre-pandemic attendee levels.
Because business leaders are finding ways to gather more data with every passing year, the topics discussed at RampUp have never been more important. The data-powered marketing ecosystem is chock full of innovation, including new providers finding new ways to monetize assets and information that had not historically been used for marketing purposes. To prepare for the future, business leaders must learn to harness, understand, and act on their data.
If you missed this year’s gathering – don’t worry! We’ve rounded up key insights and takeaways from RampUp 2023.
Data Collaboration is Top of Mind for Marketing Leaders
“Data collaboration” was probably the most used term at RampUp 2023. Data collaboration refers to the act of gathering and connecting data from various sources to unlock combined data insights. Given the impending death of the third party cookie, marketers are particularly interested in collecting and unifying first party data.
Once connected and harmonized, data can be used for a variety of marketing purposes, including creating new products, running analytics, or building targeted campaigns.
Given general economic uncertainty, many marketers will rebalance their digital marketing efforts this year to focus more on performance, and less on awareness. Insights derived from an increased focus on data collaboration across first-party data sets will in turn drive greater ROAS.
“Over the last 5 years, we’ve moved from first-party data points to first-party data sets.”
Identity Resolution is Standing in the Way of Personalization
Personalization is an important use case for data collaboration. Once data is harmonized and connected, it can be used to connect consumers to relevant marketing messages and personalized experiences.
But business leaders are struggling to capture and connect known & unknown user identities, leading to fragmented user experiences. This identity resolution issue is especially difficult given current privacy and compliance environments.
To resolve issues with identity resolution, marketing service providers are focused on enabling consent management best practices. They’re also developing the technical foundation to connect all events (activities) to entities, known or unknown in a privacy-complaint deidentified environment.
Data Clean Rooms are a Technical Imperative for 2023
“Marketers will accelerate migration to data clean rooms once third party cookies are finally deprecated.”
Speaking of sunsetting third-party cookies, data clean rooms are top of mind for technology leaders for 2023. Clean rooms provide aggregated, yet anonymous user information, allowing marketers and advertisers to target a specific audience without accessing personally identifiable information (PPI). Data clean rooms protect user privacy without sacrificing adtech operations for advertisers. As the lack of third-party cookies limit advertiser access to user information required for audience segmentation and ad targeting, data clean rooms are a great solution.
However, the data clean room hype is still a few steps away from reality. Brands have yet to clearly define use cases, and leaders are proceeding with caution as they evaluate clean room technology.
Retiring Technical Debt is Critically Important for Data Service Providers
As you can see, 2023 is a year of building and growing technical capabilities with respect to collecting, unifying, and acting on data – especially first-party data. As data service providers seek to grow, many CTOs are drowning in technical debt. For many, technical debt is getting in the way of developing new capabilities.
The importance of resolving technical debt can’t be understated. Because it demands precious engineering capacity. Engineering teams will be searching for better solutions for resolving technical debt in 2023, and ensuring their new builds remain debt-free.
“Retiring technical debt still represents 40% of my company’s engineering efforts.”
From Insight to Action: Data Collaboration, Identity Resolution, Data Clean Room Enablement, and Technical Debt Mitigation
RampUp 2023 has given data technology leaders a lot to consider about future innovation and priorities. As you assess your needs across data collaboration and harmonization, identity resolution, data clean rooms, and resolving technical debt, consider Aqfer’s Build-it-Together solutions.
Aqfer’s Marketing Data Platform as a Service is purpose-built so that marketing solution providers can accelerate delivering value to their diverse and complicated marketing customers. We tackle core data challenges on your behalf, so your team can focus on delivering unique value to your customers. Click here to learn more about our core solutions.