The traditional relationship between media companies and media buyers is fairly one-sided in favor of the media company. Media buyers pay a large portion of their budgets to display ads to targeted audiences on a media company’s platform and in return get limited data and insights with which to optimize their campaigns and make decisions about allocating budgets across platforms. According to Insider Intelligence, 64% of all US digital ad spending in 2021 went to Google, Facebook, and Amazon, a sign of the vast audience networks and power the triopoly wield. Media buyers are increasingly in a bind — with increased pressure to influence sales in spite of data regulations cutting into their use of cookies to track ad performance and algorithms on platforms providing lower quality, more expensive leads.
Whether a media buyer is working with a walled garden (like Facebook, Amazon, or Google), a retail media network, CTV, or a niche publisher, it can seem like an uphill battle to collect enough insights to efficiently evaluate performance across platforms. Without large datasets of their own — or the means to easily share data — media buyers often think they have little leverage with media publishers. They are tasked to perform and optimize campaigns with scant insights, and they miss out on opportunities to experiment with new audiences, channels, and brand partnerships. Limited access to data also holds them back from innovating and extending learnings into other parts of the business. It amounts to a fundamental constraint on the overall growth of the company.
Whether driven by in-house teams or outside agencies, from a data perspective this “traditional” type of media buying can be termed “passive”, in the sense that the ad buys yield a basic amount of external data but do not help build a deeper understanding of the organization’s internal data. “Passive media buyers” constantly find themselves at something of a dead end. There is an alternative, however. A new way of working is emerging, one which leverages data collaboration and data clean rooms to enable marketers to become “empowered” media buyers.
Empowered Media Buyers: building a stronger relationship with media companies
What’s the difference? Empowered media buyers bring their own first-party data to the partnership with media companies — achieving a collaborative relationship in which each side benefits from greater access to data. Let’s look at three key advantages of data collaboration:
- Improved bottom line. Analyst firm Gartner recently identified a 3x greater economic benefit for firms that share data externally, so there’s powerful motivation for organizations to want to work with external datasets. And marketers have got the message: across industries, nearly 80% of organizations want to collaborate with other businesses to share data in the next 12 months, and almost 70% want to expand their current data collaborations.
- A more balanced relationship. Media buyers recognize their own data has value, and that enables a move from a simple user (and payer) relationship with media companies to a mutually beneficial one in which both sides are peers. Buyers can supply insights that enable media companies to develop stronger performance, advertising, and development capabilities.
- Enriched data. Media buyers can enrich their first-person data with data from media companies. The customer journey insights stemming from that enrichment often spark innovation that goes beyond marketing and into other areas of the business — think product development, supply chain, production, and other core business functions. At the same time, media companies understand that the benefits of data collaboration apply to their data operations as well.
For data collaboration, a modern data clean room solution is a must
We can see that data collaboration is the key to unlocking more strategic decisions and adding value to your company. But accessing simple, secure, scalable data collaboration that enables your media buyers to become empowered and gain control of their campaigns requires a modern data clean room solution.
There’s a wide range of data clean room solutions (which we’ve discussed in detail), but for now we’ll focus on the most advanced software, such as Habu’s. At a high level, these clean room solutions deliver three essential capabilities for marketing organizations:
- Privacy and governance. Media companies will not share data absent a secure, privacy-preserving data clean room that gives them confidence in the safety of their data.
- Interoperability. A modern data clean room solution enables marketing organizations to freely connect with multiple media publishers and walled gardens, including Amazon, Facebook, and Google.
- Ease of use. The best data clean room software is simple enough for non-technical teams and lines of business to use — accelerating time to insight and ROI.
Take it to the next level
Habu data clean room software delivers advanced data collaboration features — but also something no other vendor in the market can provide: the simplicity, security, interoperability, and unparalleled flexibility of collaborative intelligence. Capable of powering any use case at scale, and easily leveraged by data scientists and lines of business alike, Habu enables marketing organizations to transform their media partner relationships, yielding insights that drive efficiency and growth.
As a media buyer, you can download our Incrementality and Full-Funnel Case Study to learn how granular insights can power your attribution models to improve budget allocation into your highest performing channels. Have questions? Contact us and we can show you what data collaboration can do for you.
