In a recent piece of research from Digiday, 64% of publisher respondents said that 1st party data is the most significant factor in “creating positive ad revenue outcomes”. This number is up from 53% last year.
So for advertising-led monetisation, publisher audience data is an asset that is only getting more important. Using first party data to create more relevant audience segments to sell to advertisers can help publishers to:
But often it is hard for publishers to create the audience insights needed when responding to briefs — resulting in lost revenue. Often, only data teams are able to query and segment their data to create audiences. This can cause delays as there can be too much demand on that team. When advertisers and their media agencies require a quick turnaround from publishers for their campaign plans, it can result in potentially losing deals.
To fix this, publisher sales teams need to be more self-sufficient with data. At a mediarithmics hosted roundtable alongside the AOP in March, publishers revealed that they want their sales teams to be more data literate so they can quickly access and segment audience data to respond to client needs without support from the data team.
So the ability to effectively analyse data and communicate audience insights has become a critical skill for media sales professionals.
But that is far from easy. It is not historically part of their role meaning advanced data analysis skillsets are rarely found in sales roles. And often audience data is trapped in hard-to-access technologies, making it difficult for sales teams to discover the insights they need quickly.
However, with the right tools and training, media sales teams can create data-driven audience segments easily, helping them to respond to more briefs successfully.
Modern Customer Data Platforms are able to deliver classic DMP capabilities in one joined up platform — providing a fuller picture of audiences using any available identifier, and integrations into the rest of a publisher’s ad tech stack.
It should include all audience data in real time, not just ageing, partial or aggregated data. It should also use a range of different identifiers to make audiences as addressable as possible. With a full picture of your audience, a CDP should free data to be accessible to any relevant team in the business — not just those with advanced data skills. The technology needs to empower salespeople to be able to query data without code so that they can:
The advanced next step is to help advertisers understand the audience overlap between a publisher and their customers using a data clean room. A data clean room integrated within a CDP will make this easy to query and even easier to push into your SSP — and will help publisher salespeople support advertisers’ pre-campaign planning.
In the near future, this entire question may not even be relevant. Advances in GenAI may make querying data as simple as writing a prompt. But until that becomes a reliable reality, sales teams need to be given the tools to discover the audience insights without the need for data teams support.
mediarithmics is a modern Customer Data Platform with integrated audience monetisation functionality. We provide many of Europe’s leading media companies with the tools so anyone in their business can easily query data to create accurate and up to date segments.
To see how we can help your salespeople better use data to sell media, get in touch.
