While few people admit to liking ads, most would be hard pressed to say that they have never bought a product recommended to them on a website or willingly signed up for a brand’s mailing list. The difference is in how the consumer experiences what you put in front of them: Is it an ad or a welcomed experience? To achieve this consistently requires building customer intelligence and making a complete view of the customer safely and securely available to permissioned teams at your organization.

If this complete view of the customer was easy to achieve, everyone would be taking active strides to fill in intelligence gaps. But it can be difficult to get started for a variety of reasons: concerns over consumer privacy, speed of seeing results or reluctance to simply do something different.

The good news is that the technology and partnerships exist to make it safer and easier to remove these roadblocks on the journey to gaining a 360-degree view of the customer and building genuine brand love.

Privacy-enhancing technologies hit the mainstream 

From their origins in academia and early adoption by governmental agencies and highly regulated industries, privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) have entered broader business conversations for their ability to accelerate safe data collaboration, build customer intelligence, and maximize the value of data without relinquishing control or compromising consumer privacy. These technologies expand the frontier of what’s possible with first-party data in a way that maximizes privacy and utility.

If previous conversations you’ve had about building customer intelligence have ended over privacy concerns, vendors with PETs embedded are worth engaging to understand what they can unlock for you:

• If you’re a health care system, you can safely and securely connect with competitors to collaborate on research and accelerate life-saving discoveries, as Johns Hopkins, Duke and others did as part of the Covid-19 CHARGE consortium tasked with improving treatments, outcomes and public health programs.
• If you’re a retailer interested in working more closely with CPG suppliers and becoming a trusted media and analytics partner, you can set up a retail media exchange to safely pool information and provide better intelligence to the brands you carry, as CVS Health did with its CMX platform.
• If you’re a brand concerned with the demise of the third-party cookie and the gaps the absence of this data will leave in your customer intelligence and addressable reach, you can build a new data foundation with PETs embedded, as Bayer did and shared at RampUp in the session The Customer Intelligence Opportunity You Can’t Afford to Miss.

Start small with a single media partner

One of the most common use cases for building customer intelligence is collaborating with media partners to more accurately measure ROI and gain insight into shifting viewership behaviors. An easy way to start is by choosing just one media partner to collaborate with and leveraging its data foundation to connect sensitive data sets with the assurance that it won’t be moved or copied. You can take knowledge from that experience to connect with other media partners, or even become your own media hub.

As Diego Vaccarezza, senior director enterprise media at CVS Health shared on an Adweek webinar: “We activated with a single media partner [and] funded our own pilot campaigns. Those early results showed that we had something—that we could indeed activate our data for targeting and measurement, and really see material business results. I think it was those early wins that then put us on the path where we find ourselves now, which is scaling and growing off of those first test campaigns into a real viable business model and revenue stream for CVS.”

Innovate on what’s possible with partners

Pandemic aside, brands have had to deal with a lot of change. More than ever, those challenges are shared and it’s worth connecting with partners to learn together.

An area where we’ve seen increased collaboration in service of better understanding shared audiences and customers is between advertisers and TV. We recently connected a large CPG advertiser with a TV platform so they could share higher level insights that they hadn’t before. The two collaborated on forging a mutually beneficial partnership where the CPG would prioritize activating on the TV platform and in return, it would receive more granular detail on its TV ad strategy, enriching its understanding of audiences that could benefit other parts of its business.

Build genuine brand love

All of the steps outlined above are in service of a larger goal: building genuine brand love. By narrowing customer intelligence gaps, you’ll be better equipped to understand consumers’ changing needs and become a seamless part of consumers’ days—the spaghetti sauce they buy for their kids, the shoes they lace up for a morning run, the end of the week treat—rather than merely an ad.