Inside ITV’s first-party data strategy

In this guest blog Lara Izlan, ITV Director of Advertising Data, dives into ITV’s first-party data strategy, what it means for ITV clients and the role of InfoSum’s decentralised marketing infrastructure in bringing this to its customers.

First-party data has never been more important

With the introduction of GDPR all organisations in the digital advertising ecosystem are having to rethink the way they collect, buy, and use customer data for advertising targeting and measurement; and in particular, refocus entirely on privacy-compliant first-party data solutions.

Until recently, targeting and measurement within the marketing industry have almost solely relied on the use of third-party cookies. These proxies for identity have been used by media owners to identify and track their audience across devices and make them available for brands to target.

With Apple, Mozilla and Google committing to end support of third-party cookies, the technology giants have signalled an end to this approach.

In parallel, we have seen significant growth in brands selling direct to consumers, which has only accelerated during the COVID-19 lockdown. This has resulted in a growing number of advertisers collecting sizable volumes of their own first-party data from customer transactions.

With an ITV Hub registered user base of 32 million, ITV is in a unique position to be able to provide an addressable audience at scale to advertising clients that is not dependent on third-party cookies. The challenge then is how we make our vast audience, with its rich attribute level data, work alongside other first-party data sets in a way that is both secure and privacy compliant.

Collaboration between advertisers and media owners, bringing together their rich first-party data, presents a powerful opportunity to drive digital marketing tactics, such as upselling to existing customers, or maximising reach to prospective customers by excluding current customers.‍

InfoSum’s decentralised marketing infrastructure‍

Such tactics have for a long time been the mainstay of digital advertising platforms such as Facebook with its Custom Audiences solution. However, this type of approach previously required the advertiser to pass their first-party data to the vendor. In effect, advertisers must cede control of their data assets to a third-party.

InfoSum has pioneered a privacy-first approach to data collaboration. Their decentralised marketing infrastructure and Bunker solutions empower data owners to collaborate across their first-party data sources, without sharing their data - enabling combined insights to be unlocked in a secure and privacy-compliant manner.

Our ITV Hub audience is held in our own private and secure InfoSum Bunker. Advertisers wishing to work with ITV also have their first-party data in a standalone Bunker. The data within these Bunkers never moves. Instead, InfoSum’s infrastructure enables anonymous statistical analysis to be conducted across advertiser data and ITV’s audience. Insights from the combined data sets enable us to build relevant, sizable addressable audiences to power advertisers’ marketing strategies. These can be activated exclusively in PlanetV, our addressable advertising platform designed for premium broadcaster inventory.

Protecting the privacy of our audience is of paramount importance to ITV. With InfoSum’s privacy-by-design approach, no personal data is ever shared between parties. Additionally, InfoSum’s use of differential privacy techniques means no single individual can ever be reidentified during the analysis and activation process that isn’t already known to each party. Not only does this provide peace of mind to both ITV and our advertising clients, but it also reduces the burden on compliance.