Magnite will work with the real estate leader to extend its high-value audiences offsite and unlock new routes for brands to connect with high-intent home buyers

Magnite, the largest independent sell-side advertising company, announced that REMAX, LLC, one of the world’s leading franchisors of real estate brokerage services, has selected Magnite as its partner to accelerate the growth of its commerce media business. REMAX will work with Magnite to monetize its onsite digital inventory and activate its first-party home buyer data offsite via curated audience packages, creating new opportunities for brands to reach high-intent home buyers.

REMAX is the first real estate franchisor brand to launch a commerce media network, revolutionizing the way real estate and advertising converge and positioning itself to tap into the growing trend of retail media. Leveraging Magnite’s curation tools, REMAX will enrich media supply with its proprietary first-party homebuyer data, and package premium audience segments based on critical attributes such as income level, age, and homebuying stage. This approach enables advertisers and agencies to activate REMAX data against Magnite’s premium inventory, with the advantage of precise targeting and streamlined programmatic workflows.

“We know brands are looking for precision and efficiency, and enabling our data through the supply side helps deliver both,” said Abby Lee, EVP of Marketing, Communications and Events at REMAX, LLC. “We’re excited to work with Magnite to bring our commerce media strategy to life through the REMAX Media Network, and offer advertisers smarter, more powerful ways to reach the people making major life purchases with the right message at the right time.”

Marketing Technology News: MarTech Interview with Liat Barer, Chief Product Officer @ Odeeo

Unlike general mover data, the REMAX audience segments reflect real-time home buyer intent signals that matter most to categories like mortgage lending, insurance, home goods, financial services, and more. With Magnite technology, REMAX can now scale these audiences offsite and make them available to buyers in their platform of choice, with the added opportunity for higher match rates, improved cost efficiency, and stronger brand safety controls that come with enabling data on the supply side.

“REMAX agents have long been trusted guides for home buyers and sellers, and now we’re tapping into that power to help brands connect with consumers during one of life’s most important decision-making windows,” said Stephanie Reustle, Head of Commerce Media at Magnite. “This relationship is designed to maximize the value of the REMAX brand’s rich home buyer data while giving advertisers the ability to reach these audiences wherever they are.”

Launched in December 2024, the REMAX Media Network spans digital and offline activations across the U.S. and Canada, leveraging the brand’s expansive digital ecosystem to provide advertisers with a unique platform to connect with consumers. Aligning with the broader industry trend of data moving to the supply side, working with Magnite helps extend reach and enhance the value and performance of curated commerce media campaigns.

We’re Magnite (NASDAQ: MGNI), the largest independent sell-side advertising company. Publishers use our technology to monetize their content across all screens and formats—including CTV, online video, display, and audio. The world’s leading agencies and brands trust our platform to access brand-safe, high-quality ad inventory and execute billions of advertising transactions each month. Anchored in transparency, our platforms are built on modern, cloud infrastructure and drive performance and efficiency for buyers and sellers alike.

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Write in to psen@itechseries.com to learn more about our exclusive editorial packages and programs.

Brands are increasingly recognizing the potential of native advertising to create meaningful connections with their audience. Native advertising, which seamlessly blends with the publisher’s content, offers a non-disruptive and engaging way for brands to reach consumers.

Native advertising leverages compelling storytelling to build brand affinity and trust. Together, they offer a powerful tool for brands to convey impactful messages that appeal to their target audience, driving both engagement and conversion. This growing popularity signifies a shift towards more integrated and consumer-centric advertising strategies.

Understanding the Power of Native Advertising

These benefits highlight the immense potential of native advertising in creating compelling ad experiences that integrate seamlessly with publisher content.

1. Enhanced User Experience:

Native ads, by design, blend seamlessly with the content of the platform they’re on. This provides a non-disruptive and engaging user experience, as the ads feel less like traditional advertising and more like part of the content.

2. Improved Brand Perception:

Native advertising allows brands to foster trust and authority by offering valuable information to the audience. This form of advertising is less about selling products and more about building a relationship with consumers through quality content.

3. Increased Engagement:

The interactive nature of native advertising encourages user engagement. These ads are designed to be engaging and interesting, leading to higher click-through rates and more time spent on the ad.

4. Better Conversion Rates:

By delivering personalized and relevant content, these strategies can significantly improve conversion rates. Customers are believed to be highly likely to engage with an ad and take action when the content is relevant to them.

5. Greater Reach:

Native ads have the advantage of bypassing ad blockers, ensuring your message reaches a wider audience. As these ads are integrated into the content, ad-blocking software is less likely to block them.

6. Effective Storytelling:

Native advertising enables brands to tell compelling stories, fostering emotional connections with consumers. This form of advertising is all about storytelling, which enables brands to create a deeper connection with their audience.

Marketing Technology News: MarTech Interview with Kelly Hopping, CMO @ Demandbase

Tips for Brands to Create Engaging and Integrated Ad Experiences

Creating compelling native ad experiences that seamlessly integrate with publisher content is a powerful strategy for brands. Here are ten detailed pointers on how brands can achieve this:

1. Understand the Platform:

Each digital platform has its unique style, audience, and content format. Brands should thoroughly understand these nuances to create ads that feel native to the platform, enhancing user engagement and receptivity.

2. Know Your Audience:

A deep understanding of the target audience is crucial. Brands need to develop content that appeals to their audience’s interests, needs, and behaviors, thereby fostering a stronger connection and improving the effectiveness of the ad.

3. Create Quality Content:

The content in native advertising should be high-quality, informative, and engaging. It should provide value to the audience, not just promote the brand, thereby building trust and credibility.

4. Use Visuals Effectively:

Visuals can significantly enhance content engagement. Brands should use relevant images, videos, and infographics in their ads to attract attention and convey their message more effectively.

5. Personalize the Content:

Personalized content can significantly improve engagement rates. Brands should leverage data and insights to deliver personalized and relevant content to each user, enhancing the ad’s relevance and effectiveness.

6. Tell a Story:

Storytelling can make content more engaging and memorable. Brands should tell compelling stories that connect with their audience on an emotional level, thereby enhancing brand recall and affinity.

7. Use Clear Call-to-Actions:

A clear and compelling call-to-action can encourage the target audience to take a desired action, improving conversion rates. It should be concise, persuasive, and aligned with the ad’s objective.

8. Test and Optimize:

Brands should continually test different elements of their ads and optimize based on the results to improve performance. This iterative process can help brands refine their strategy and maximize their return on investment.

9. Respect User Experience:

The ad should not disrupt the user experience. It should feel like a natural part of the content, not an intrusive ad, thereby maintaining user engagement and receptivity.

10. Stay Up-to-Date:

The landscape of digital advertising is continually changing. It is crucial for brands to keep abreast of the most recent developments and best practices in native and content advertising to maintain an effective and pertinent strategy.

Conclusion

Native advertising offers a powerful avenue for brands to connect with their audience. Successful examples include Cornerstone, which leveraged Taboola’s discovery platform to boost subscriptions and enhance customer loyalty, and Apple’s ‘Shot on iPhone’ campaign, which used user-generated content to showcase the camera quality. Another notable example is Dove’s ‘Real Beauty’ campaign, which started conversations about beauty standards. These brands have demonstrated how effectively integrating native and content advertising can create compelling ad experiences, foster brand affinity, and drive business growth.

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_________

Marketing and Marketing Tech Quote-of-the-Week!

When using AI from a data workflow or ETL perspective, it’s extremely important to keep a “human in the loop”. This means having a human involved in setting up data procedures, testing them and ensuring that the outputs are aligned with expectations. It is still too risky to let AI fully control the movement of sensitive data without human-based approval. AI can do a great job on things like summarization, analyzing trends, and even augmenting incomplete data. But we must ensure that, from a customer and marketing perspective, the right data is used and the wrong data does not get activated.

–  Jon Moran, Head of MarTech Solutions Marketing @ SAS

Marketing Tech Shout-out-of-the-Week!

Hootsuite

Thousands of brands rely on Hootsuite’s platform and solutions to launch brilliant social campaigns, deliver 5-star social commerce experiences, and manage all their customer conversations in one place.

Top MarTech Articles on AdTech, Advertising, Gamification, MarTech Burnout and more!

• Unlocking Organizational Value in a Rapidly Changing Marketing Ecosystem
• Top Digital Advertising Trends for 2025
• Brands Are Hooked on Gamification: How Can You Jump in on the Opportunity
• Avoid Martech Burnout: Deciding when it’s time for Martech replacements
• Omnichannel Marketing and Social Commerce – Unlocking New Revenue Streams
• Achieving True Omnichannel Experiences with Martech
• Significance of Data Governance In Marketing Technology (Martech)

MarTech Q&A of The Week

AI powered ad-tech democratizes digital marketing. What used to take large teams can be done by an individual leveraging technology. As we see the barriers to entry come down in commerce, it will be interesting to see how storytelling and branding improves across product categories. We’re in a world where there are more options than ever, so the methods a brand uses to effectively communicate and connect with their audience, wherever their audiences are (ex: social channels, commerce sites, watching videos), will build a strong customer base and loyalty.

–  Zoe Lu, SVP, SMB @ Pacvue

Missed The Latest Episode of The SalesStar Podcast? Have a quick listen here!

Episode 219: The State of Al and AdTech: with Oz Etzioni, CEO and Co-founder of Clinch

Episode 218: The Evolving MarTech and SalesTech Ecosystem: with Rony Vexelman, VP Marketing at Optimove

With privacy laws becoming stricter and public scrutiny about targeting underage consumers with ads for cannabis, alcohol, tobacco cessation, and sports gambling growing, advertisers need to be particularly vigilant about how they manage their digital campaigns. Although recent adtech innovations offer better solutions for transparency and very specific age controls, it’s essential to understand the broader context of how targeting practices are evolving—and how to navigate these changes responsibly.

Google’s Policy Breach: What Happened?

Google’s advertising policies are designed to prevent targeting sensitive groups, including minors. However, news that some of Google’s automated ad systems may have recommended targeting teenagers under 18 is a breach of trust that highlights the complexities of automated ad targeting, hand-wavy explanations of audience age data and the risks involved in leaving these decisions entirely to algorithms.

For advertisers, this raises the stakes for not relying solely on automated systems for ethical decisions. Algorithms can optimize for clicks and engagement, but they do not inherently capture the legal and ethical nuances of audience targeting. This is where human oversight becomes crucial and determinative age or date of birth data is critical. Advertisers must remain vigilant to ensure that they’re not inadvertently violating policies or targeting groups they shouldn’t be.

The Risks of Targeting Minors

Targeting minors with advertising carries significant legal risks. Laws like the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) in the United States and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe place strict limits on how data from children and teens can be collected, used, and shared. Non-compliance with these laws can result in heavy fines, reputational damage, and a loss of consumer trust.

Beyond legal risks, there are ethical concerns. Minors are more susceptible to persuasive advertising, even for regulated products they’re not supposed to be marketed to such as sports gaming, cannabis, and more. And they often lack the full understanding of how their data is being used. Brands need to be especially cautious in how they engage younger audiences, prioritizing transparency and responsibility to build trust. This responsibility extends beyond simply complying with the law—it’s about creating a relationship with consumers that is built on ethical practices.

Marketing Technology News: MarTech Interview with Arthur Leopold, co-founder and CEO @ Agentio

The Role of First-Party Data and Transparency in Digital Advertising

Given the increasing scrutiny on third-party data practices, many advertisers are turning to first-party data as a more reliable, privacy-compliant option to reaching customers. First-party data is collected directly from consumers with their consent, making it a safer and more ethical way to engage audiences. It also allows brands to build stronger, more direct relationships with their customers. By focusing on first-party data, advertisers can reduce their reliance on third-party platforms and their algorithms.

The importance of transparency in digital advertising can’t be overstated. As privacy concerns grow, consumers and regulators alike are demanding more visibility into how ads are served and what data is used. For advertisers, this means working with platforms that provide clear insights into audience targeting and campaign performance.

Marketers need to ensure they are utilizing media buying platforms that emphasize transparency, offering advertisers detailed reporting on where their ads are placed, how they are performing, and who they are reaching. By having access to comprehensive data and insights, advertisers can make informed decisions and avoid the risks associated with blind reliance on third-party platforms.

Staying Ahead of Compliance Challenges

Even the most well-established platforms are not infallible. To mitigate risk, advertisers need to take a proactive approach to ensure their campaigns are compliant with regulations and respectful of their audience’s privacy.

One key approach is to conduct regular audits of campaigns, particularly those targeting younger audiences, to ensure that they are not violating any legal or ethical guidelines. It’s also crucial to maintain a close watch on any new updates or policy changes from platforms like Google. Staying informed and adaptable is the best way to ensure compliance and avoid costly mistakes.

The controversy surrounding Google’s targeting of minors serves as an important lesson for the advertising industry. It’s not enough to rely on platforms to manage compliance—brands must take responsibility for their own practices, ensuring that their advertising strategies are both legally compliant and ethically sound.

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________

Marketing and Marketing Tech Quote-of-the-Week!

Adtech is leveling the playing field by making high-performing ad channels, like creator integrations, accessible at scale. Innovations like AI-driven matching, predictive analytics, and automated workflows are shifting the focus from transactional ad buys to meaningful, performance-driven partnerships.

–  Arthur Leopold, co-founder and CEO at Agentio

MarTech Shout-out-of-the-Week!

Shirofune

Japan’s No1. Search and Social marketing platform is launching in the US starting 2023. Shirofune has 91% market share in Japan and it’s been used by top digital agencies like Dentsu or Rakuten, as well as numerous small agencies and advertisers.

Top MarTech News of The Week: 02^nd to 6^th December 2024

• Kaltura Launches AI-Powered ‘Work Genie’ Delivering Hyper-Personalized Customer and Employee Experiences
• NIQ Releases 2025 CMO Outlook Report
• Adobe and Amazon Web Services Partner to Bring Adobe Experience Platform to Brands and Enhance Customer Engagement with Deep Insights
• Amperity Launches Customer Data Cloud to Fix Complex Data Architectures
• Amagi Acquires Argoid AI to Accelerate AI-driven Innovation in the Media and Entertainment Industry
• AudiencePoint Launches Groundbreaking Audience Engagement Suite, Raising the Bar for Email Marketing
• Searchspring Revolutionizes Ecommerce Insights with Next-gen Analytics & Reporting
• Enterpret Announces $20.8 Million Series A
• Thumzup Plans Integration of Proprietary Advertising Platform with TikTok to Significantly Expand Potential Social Media Market Reach
• Lucra Raises $10M in Funding to Drive Brand Loyalty Through Gamification
• Scalestack Secures $3 Million to Transform GTM Ops at Enterprise Scale

MarTech Articles on AI, Ad Personalization, State of AdTech and more!

• How Marketers Can Use AI to Boost Holiday ROI
• In the TikTokization era of Advertising, the ‘Perfect Ad’ doesn’t exist. Where do creators go from here?
• Balancing Ad Personalization With Consumer Privacy
• The State of Advertising and Digital Media Marketing: A Guide for Emerging Companies
• How a Dot Com Domain and Top-Level-Word Drives SEO and Boost Visibility
• Ethical Programmatic Advertising: Balancing AI, Automation, and Consumer Trust
• The Growing Importance of Lead Enrichment Tools
• ABM and CDP: Two Must-have tools in the B2B Martech Stack

MarTech Q&A of The Week

When adopting AI-powered header bidding, several important factors must be considered. First, maintain data integrity and transparency while learning about algorithmic decision-making processes.

–Gulab Patil, Founder & CEO @ Lemma

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Episode 218: The Evolving MarTech and SalesTech Ecosystem: with Rony Vexelman, VP Marketing at Optimove

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_________

Marketing and Marketing Tech Quote-of-the-Week!

Now, companies are beginning to realize the importance of understanding what’s in their archives. This allows them to decide which assets should be cleaned up or moved to long-term storage, while categorizing them in a way that makes future discovery easy—without having to manually review each video. Furthermore, this process enables companies to identify assets that can be monetized immediately.

–Luciano Escudero, VP of Media Engineering at Globant

MarTech Shout-out-of-the-Week!

Productsup

Productsup powers commerce success by enabling global companies to perfect their product content journeys. The highly scalable platform is equipped for even the most sophisticated enterprise customers, helping them reach all of their target consumers worldwide and maximize their full potential.

Top MarTech News of The Week: 18th to 23rd November

• Enterprise Companies, Fear No More: CommBox Secures $15M Investment, Prioritizing AI in Customer Experience
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• Optimizely Expands Partnership With Google Cloud to Increase Access to Google Gemini Models, Marketing Workflows and Data Warehouse Analytics
• Levanta Secures $20 Million in Series A Funding Led by Volition Capital to Accelerate Creator-Driven Commerce
• Stirista Empowers Marketers with Newly Launched API Marketing Suite for Unmatched Campaign Performance
• Optimizely Launches Industry-Leading AI Agents Across the Entire Marketing Workflow
• Mediaocean to Acquire Innovid (NYSE:CTV) 

MarTech Articles on Customer Identity, Ad and Data Privacy, Customer Trust and more!

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MarTech Q&A of The Week

In today’s ad-buying landscape, one of the most pressing issues is the fragmentation between platforms and the ad “waste” that’s cause by the fragmentation. We continue to hear that advertisers are struggling to manage campaigns across multiple mediums—broadcast, streaming, and digital—while maintaining consistency, targeting accuracy, and effective measurement. This complexity often leads to inefficient ad spending and makes it harder for brands to deliver cohesive, effective campaigns. Additionally, the dominance of walled gardens, where major platforms restrict data access, limits advertisers’ ability to obtain a holistic view of their audience across all channels, making informed decision-making even more challenging.

– Keith Kazerman, President of Streaming @ Locality

Missed The Latest Episode of The SalesStar Podcast? Have a quick listen here!

Episode 217: Using the Sentiment of Appreciation to Drive Sales Cycles: with Brendan Kamm, CEO & Co-Founder of Thnks

Episode 216: AI’s Overall Business Impact with Yinyin Liu, VP, AI at Seismic

Episode 215: AI, and Emerging Opportunities for Marketers and MarTech: with Heather Blank, SVP GTM Strategy and Partnerships, Iterable

OpenAI, the major tech giants, and a burgeoning array of startups release so many (often jaw-dropping) innovations each day that simply keeping up is nearly a full-time job.

As AI continues to evolve and improve, it promises to permeate and reshape nearly every element of knowledge work – liberating humans from time-consuming tasks and producing ways to better create content, parse data, communicate, and understand the world. The impending AI wave will undoubtedly and irrevocably alter nearly every industry, but the coming changes will be especially wrenching for predominantly digital industries like advertising and media. But time will not stand still, and companies that ignore the changing tides do so at their own (great) peril.

The AI-powered golden age for advertising and media

Marketers, it seems, are already awake to AI’s potential. A 2024 Marketing AI Institute study revealed 99% of respondents are personally using AI in their personal lives or professional endeavors.

Currently, marketers are harnessing generative AI tools to generate significantly more customized content, which they will advertise to hyper-specific segments. Meta and Adobe are among the many startups that enable people to create AI videos with text prompts and other inputs.

Publicly available tools like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Claude, and others can be prompted into effective copywriting, and a new crop of startups is already emerging to automate tasks like copywriting and testing thousands of different taglines with relative ease.

AI is also beginning to revolutionize content creation. Image Generation tools like MidJourney, DALL-E, and Firefly already dramatically lower the cost of prototyping and concept art, and creative studios are figuring out how to use AI broadly to facilitate rapid production, repurposing, and remixing of materials, while significantly reducing overall ad production costs.

Cheaper, more effective ads help not just advertisers but publishers as well – the more value advertisers derive from running an ad, the more they’ll be willing to pay for the ad space to run it. This helps publishers who have a) many attention-minutes to sell, b) distinctive audiences, c) quality audience data, d) compelling content, and/or e) sophisticated recommendation algorithms.

AI’s outsized role in enhanced measurement

While marketers have long had access to robust measurement tools, the real challenge lies in their effective utilization.

• Marketers must design experiments that actually test—and either validate or refute—hypotheses about which creative and media strategies resonate best with their audiences
• Marketers must apply rigorous statistics to glean useful conclusions from measurement data (while remaining humble about what questions their data cannot )
• Marketers must communicate complex results to (often non-technical) stakeholders
• Marketers must put insights into practice. Few marketers are equipped to make 1,000 small changes to a campaign, even when doing so may double a campaign’s performance

Marketing Technology News: MarTech Interview with Keith Kazerman, President of Streaming @ Locality

Each step requires effort and expertise.

AI can materially help with (and in the near future, may entirely automate) each of these steps. LLMs have “read” every textbook on statistics and experiment design; LLMs (particularly “reasoning”-enhanced LLMs like OpenAI’s “O1” model) can manipulate statistical equations and write analytical Python code; LLMs can write compelling, audience-tailored prose, make insightful, actionable presentations, and patiently answer stakeholder questions. And LLMs (together with classic machine learning and DSP APIs) can put campaign optimizations directly into practice.

To be fair, generative AI still requires hand-holding to perform each of these steps. But model abilities will continue to improve rapidly over time. It is wise to focus more on AI’s trajectory than its current foibles.

Real measurement is an evaluation of what works, not an endorsement of what has been done. Embracing measurement requires (often uncomfortable) change, beginning with an acknowledgement that some of the things you’re doing aren’t working. Airtight methodology and transparent, automated analysis can bolster confidence in the conclusions drawn, making it easier to convince stakeholders to adapt, even when those conclusions are challenging to accept.

As cutting edge measurement, analytics, and optimization via AI become broadly available and cheap, there will be little to no excuse for not applying the best tools and demanding the highest standards of performance from every ad campaign. The increasingly antiquated notion of a divide between “brand” and “performance” advertising is poised to dissolve, both philosophically and practically, as teams, agencies, and marketing departments reorganize around a more integrated approach.

Publishers’ role in the AI-everything future

AI will also empower more advanced AI assistants that consumers can use to make purchasing decisions without navigating to publishers’ sites. New search engines like Perplexity (and ChatGPT itself)  are already streamlining the search process–creating expectations for a single, definitive answer to queries, rather than a list of links with multiple options.

Brands that once relied on advertising through publisher websites as a way to reach consumers will likely pivot to focus on offering compelling data and product information that AI agents can use to determine the best match for users’ needs and preferences. This shift will redefine how brands market in an AI-centric world (and drain money from advertising budgets, hurting publisher revenues).

What should companies do?

AI has already disrupted much of the marketing sphere, and the disruption will only intensify from here. The traditional publisher-advertiser dynamic is entering a new phase. While more effective AI-powered advertising will help publishers in the short term by making ad space more valuable, the future will make it easier for brands and consumers to connect without going through publishers at all, thereby challenging the established model.

The rapid evolution and advancement of AI is bound to bring unexpected developments in creative execution, measurement, and the dynamics between publishers and advertisers. And as measurement becomes easy, cheap, and ubiquitous, brands will converge rapidly toward the techniques that work to grow their businesses. Little room will remain for any player in media and advertising that does not add meaningful, measurable value above and beyond what AI can deliver itself.

Every stakeholder in the advertising ecosystem should embrace change and experimentation, recognizing that AI will transform their businesses (with or without their permission.) The future is uncertain, but one truth is clear: no company is safe standing still.

Marketing Technology News: First-Party Data is Still the Right Bet

Although shifting to first-party data can come with challenges that may require significant investment in tech and data infrastructure, it continues to be the optimal choice for publishers looking to make their businesses more resilient against technological and regulatory changes and to provide better advertising solutions.

It’s a win-win-win

While the state of the advertising industry has accelerated, if not forced, the shift to first-party data; at The Times, we believe that first-party data could be the best thing to do for publishers, users, and advertisers.

A trusted relationship with their own audience, and the ability to facilitate advertisers’ targeting of particular segments of it, can be an important part of a publisher’s business model. A key benefit of employing first-party data is that it allows publishers to connect advertisers to their most valuable audiences. First-party data is also more reliable in creating targetable audience segments because it’s collected in context, meaning when a user is browsing the same site.

Another benefit of first-party data is that it allows publishers to show personalized ads that users prefer, which is especially true for the younger generations – a 2022 survey showed that 81% of GenZ respondents stated they liked personalized ads. Showing more relevant ads can lead to an increase in ad performance and enhanced ROI for advertisers. From an analysis conducted by New York Times Advertising in the first half of 2023, our first-party targeting solutions combined with our native display formats yielded an average CTR that was over twice as high compared to IAB benchmarks. Additionally, ​​according to an analysis from Business Insider, audiences targeted via first-party data were 57% more likely to take action than those targeted by third-party data alone.

Marketing Technology News: MarTech Interview with Keith Kazerman, President of Streaming @ Locality

The resurgence of contextual targeting

The outsized importance placed on third-party cookies comes from a belief that the most performant way of targeting is based on user profiles built by piecing together many identifiers (or signals) from different websites. However, first-party data, often combined with emerging technologies for labeling content at scale, are questioning the supremacy of identity-based targeting built on third-party data.

First-party data allows publishers to build smart ways to contextually target users based on their interactions with, and reactions to, content. An excellent example of how these tools can operate under the power of first-party data is Disney’s recent launch of Magic Words. This is a solution that uses proprietary metadata tagging to target the right creative on the right content based on the moods of scenes across Disney’s expansive library, and the emotions they are likely to elicit. By employing first-party data, publishers can build a suite of audience and contextual targeting solutions that rival, if not outperform, targeting solutions built on third-party signals.

Preparing for change

Shifting to first-party data ensures that organizations are more self-sufficient in their operations and less disrupted by unexpected changes that might further reduce the availability and reliability of third-party data. A business that relies on first-party data sits on a stronger foundation.

The industry was not prepared for Google’s deprecation of third-party cookies first announced in 2020, leaving players in the advertising space still scrambling in 2024 to find alternative solutions. Many may have breathed a sigh of relief after Google’s latest announcement, but there has never been a greater time than now to make the switch to first-party data. Signal loss remains an inevitable trend that has already started years ago, and investing in a data strategy that relies on first-party data is an excellent way to ensure organizations can future-proof their strategies and safeguard from external factors.

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