The Wall Street Journal Touts First-Party Data as Key to Repeat Media Buys

The Wall Street Journal welcomes its cookieless future, and advertisers have taken notice. The publisher, in a case study conducted in partnership with Google Ad Manager, found that advertisers whose campaigns used first-party data from The Journal were 37% more likely to run another campaign. Campaigns built using first-party data also perform better than company benchmarks on average, said David Minkin, svp of strategic planning and delivery and general manager of The Exchange. The publisher declined to offer financial specifics. The Journal has reoriented much of its advertising business in recent years to collect and utilize first-party data, including standing up proprietary software like Thematic, Safesuite and Insite. It also has access to a wealth of first-party data, given that its parent company, Dow Jones, has more than 3 million digital subscribers across its properties. Google approached the publisher to propose the case study, as The Journal wanted to see how its first-party data efforts affected client retention, Minkin said. The companies also have a long working history––on Google Ad Manager, The Journal’s network ID is No. 2. Publishers Feel Better Prepped for the Post-Cookie Future, New Data Finds The efforts of The Journal to improve its first-party data reflect the larger, identity-based efforts transforming the industry. As the deprecation of the third-party cookie within Chrome grows closer, and the marketing ecosystem remains split over its replacement, publishers have embraced first-party data as a failsafe means to identify and transact against their audiences. “Seventy-two percent of our audience segments are built or informed by first-party data,” Minkin said. “So we're going to be well positioned to be entirely off third-party data long before Google kills that cookie.” How The Exchange uses its first-party data WSJ|BG, the in-house advertising department serving The Journal and Barron’s, uses its wealth of first-party data and suite of proprietary tools to create audience segments that it can sell to advertisers. It creates attribution-based segments using subscriber information and contextual segments based on reader behavior. More than 70% of the audience segments that The Journal sells are built or informed by first-party data, according to the case study. From July to December last year, audience targeting generated 21% of first-party advertising revenue, while content targeting generated 71%. Once its creates these segments, WSJ|BG markets them to clients via direct and private marketplace deals on Google Ad Manager. To streamline direct deals, WSJ|BG makes all available segments visible in their order management study, according to the case study. Once a data-driven deal is struck, many of the first-party segments are pushed to Ad Manager using Publisher Provided Identifiers, where the ad ops team traffics the ads and pushes them live. Publishers embrace first-party data, while advertisers remain unconvinced Publishers have turned to first-party data for a variety of reasons, including the industry-wide uncertainty over the future of attribution. In the absence of any consensus replacement for the third-party cookie, using first-party data to identify users solves the problem of attribution, but only for logged-in visitors. For most publishers, the size of their logged-in audience pales in comparison to the size of their fly-by visitors, which formerly they could identify using third-party cookies. As a result, while publishers regard their first-party efforts as a viable way of understanding their most-engaged visitors, marketers are concerned about the challenge of scaling this offering, according to an industry source with knowledge of the matter. Some publishers are experimenting with registration walls as a means of solving the problem, but the method has its fair share of drawbacks, such as their potential to throttle traffic or disrupt the subscription conversion process, said Michael Silberman, svp of strategy at subscription management platform Piano. Publishers’ embrace of first-party data also stems from concerns over data leakage and devaluation. By creating a walled garden, publishers like The Journal ensure that marketers must come to them to access insights about their audience. However, in their efforts to protect user data, publishers can limit brands' ability to cross-reference their first-party data against the insights they collect. These precautions protect user data from leakage, but they do so at the expense of heightened targeting. This limitation, one simmering throughout the marketing ecosystem, remains to be substantially addressed. Clean rooms, which allow parties to commingle hashed data in a privacy-compliant manner, offer one potential solution, but––like registration walls––the concept is relatively new and few parties are eager to volunteer their bottom line for experimentation. "We have done direct first-party to first-party data comparisons with brands," Minkin said. "It hasn't led to meaningful transactions to date, but we remain open and optimistic it will become more common in the coming months and years." How Dow Jones’ Amped Up Targeting Tool Drives New Business and Ad Revenue