Tag: Amperity

Securing executive buy-in is critical for marketers is the fuel that propels organisational transformation. When leadership fully embraces the journey, they not only pave the way for change but also inspire their teams to rise to the challenge.

However, a recent Arktic Fox’s Digital & Marketing In Focus study shows we still have a long way to go. It highlights a glaring obstacle to this transformation. 

“What we found is that while organisations are embracing digital transformation – not enough are succeeding,” says Teresa Sperti, Director/Founder of Arktic Fox. “Nearly 40 per cent of leaders stated that one of the key difficulties they face is senior leadership understanding and buy-in. This topped the list.” 

This is a real problem, she says, adding, “A lack of executive knowledge and understanding when it comes to digital makes it harder to drive alignment and focus. This results in less investment while increasing the likelihood that more leaders and teams work against, not for, the change.”

Executive buy-in barriers: Why the resistance?

Despite its undeniable importance, securing executive buy-in remains the primary hurdle for leaders. Sperti says this hurdle can be attributed to a combination of factors, namely:

  1. Misguided beliefs: There is still a belief that to solve for digital transformation, organisations can hire one executive that is responsible for driving the change. 
  1. “Not my job” reluctance: Executives and boards don’t always necessarily perceive it is their role to understand the digital space, so they fail to educate themselves on what is occurring in the market.
  1. Persistent legacy mindsets: Digital is still, within many legacy organisations, not seen as how business is done in the modern age.
  1. Knowledge gap: Executives aren’t necessarily willing to admit their lack of knowledge and expertise, which inhibits their learning.

“Our research also revealed that the second biggest barrier to driving digital transformation was related to skills and capability of teams and securing investment,” Sperti shares. “We see this all the time with teams. We often work with leadership teams on new strategies, and there is enthusiasm around the strategy. But often, the organisation isn’t prepared to take the leap and invest to the level it needs to, thus hampering the ability to evolve.”

Overcoming executive resistance for transformation projects that thrive

There are four critical areas where executive decision-making and prioritisation will have a significant impact on future investments:

  1. Prioritisation: Balancing short-term vs. long-term initiatives
  2. Privacy: Preparing for changes privacy regulations and a cookieless world
  3. Personalisation: Investing in the right tools to understand your customer and build a clear value exchange
  4. People: Enabling teams and developing skills to overcome internal skill gaps

Let’s start with prioritisation. When it comes to balancing short- and long-term initiatives, executives must understand what projects and investments will make the greatest impact on the organisation. 

Drawing from the insights of industry pioneers like Les Binet and Peter Field from their research, The Long and the Short of It, executives can guide their decision-making to strike the right equilibrium between immediate results and long-term brand building, ensuring sustained success in today’s dynamic business landscape.

Striking the right balance for maximum impact

This means acknowledging that while short-term initiatives can deliver quick wins and boost revenue, long-term brand equity and customer loyalty are equally vital for enduring prosperity. Sperti’s research revealed that the key priority for 78 per cent of leaders is driving growth. Building a customer data strategy and better utilisation of first-party data came in as the second most important priority for the year ahead.

Sperti shares, “For our consulting work, often partnering at heads of level/chief-level executives, we still see far too many leaders and teams focusing on campaign and channel-based metrics as opposed to customer metrics and metrics that drive topline and bottom-line growth. Our job as marketing or digital leaders is to shift customer behaviour to drive market share growth to influence the bottom line.”

When asked to reflect on her two decades of experience client-side, gaining her perspective on how to help businesses see the value of long-term projects, Sperti says the key is to focus on the end game. “First, you need to understand how the executive makes investment decisions and the financial metrics that projects need to hit to garner investment.    

“In larger organisations, in particular, projects are assessed against metrics like NPV (net present value) and IRR (internal rate of return) and return and finance are looking for investments that meet their minimum benchmarks – alongside other metrics that are good for business like improving CX (customer experience). 

“Partnering closely with finance to develop the business case is critical,” she continues. “Engage them early on and get them to become advocates for your project and business case. You also need to paint a really compelling vision. Often leaders can get lost in the technical aspect, but the tech is not the end game – the experience it delivers is.”

Personalisation: Making CDPs a key priority for investment

As mentioned earlier, putting your customer at the center of the experience is critical for ongoing success. Mounting research suggests that companies that adopt a customer-centric approach tend to outperform their competitors in areas like revenue generation and market share.

Unsurprisingly, research shows that while leaders are beginning to pare back investments in MarTech overall, however, investment in CDPs is accelerating. In fact, the study demonstrates that 40 per cent of brands say that CDPs are a key priority for investment – double that of last year.

“2023 is clearly the year of the CDP. Over the past three years, we have been tracking investment in MarTech and priority areas for the year ahead. With demonstrable growth in the number of platforms available and the providers serving the industry, it is fair to say organisations are still trying to make sense of the complexity of what is out there and what is the right choice for their brand,” Sperti shares.

“And while there are promises of improved efficiency, effectiveness, relevance and automation at scale – for many the returns are still too elusive as they grapple with how to integrate and embed platforms to derive value and to my earlier comments invest in training so people know how to use the systems most effectively. CDP uptake is being driven by gaps in the MarTech ecosystem, limiting teams to go after opportunities and work through key challenges.”

CDP benefits in focus

Data is the fuel source of modern business. However, the value of data hinges on its quality — unreliable and outdated data leads to unreliable and ineffective decision-making. It’s a classic case of “garbage in, garbage out” and no amount of marketing or financial investment can change that fundamental truth. That’s why a CDP like Amperity is so important. 

A CDP acts as a unifying force for online and offline customer data. It takes data from every source inside your organisation, whether that’s point of sale, eCommerce, CRM (customer relationship management) web behaviour, etc and consolidates it, so you can understand who the humans are behind the data.  

That gives you a comprehensive 360-degree view of your customers. This deep understanding empowers your business with valuable insights, from past purchases that can fuel personalised recommendations to informing decisions in various departments like IT for analytics or marketing for communications. It’s unified, unlocked data. 

However, data unification is just the beginning. The true power of this unified data lies in its integration with downstream systems. Remember, it doesn’t matter what tools you have or implement if you don’t have a clean foundation of data to start with. Good data powers good marketing. 

CDP: The indispensable business tool

It’s worth noting that while CDPs were initially conceived with marketing in mind, their functionality has expanded significantly. Their ability to collect, integrate and manage customer data from diverse sources makes them indispensable for multiple business departments. From sales to customer service and even product development, the insights derived from a CDP can drive strategic decisions across the board. 

Some businesses even utilise CDPs like Amperity to calculate share prices. The reason is simple, a CDP should be the most trusted source of consumer data in your business. 

Closing the skills gap

With change taking place so quickly, organisations must keep their teams up to speed. As such, upskilling must be a key priority. However, Sperti’s research reveals that a third (33%) of leaders felt their teams’ lack of capability and skills make driving change challenging when it comes to digital transformation. 

She says, “Data and analytics once again topped the list of technical skill gaps within digital and marketing functions today – with nearly half (47%) of all participants, citing it as a key skill gap. What’s more, when we asked teams about the level of data literacy in their departments, only 35 per cent said it was strong. This means two-thirds of teams are operating without strong knowledge and skills in the data and analytics space.”

Sperti went on to say that little progress in closing the skill gaps in areas of data and analytics over the past three years has been made. “Trying to conceptualise and roll out strategies like a first-party data strategy is impossible if one, your team doesn’t have the capability to do so; two, your teams don’t know what good looks like; and three, if you are trying to build skills and capabilities whilst implementing change,” she explains. 

What’s more, the study also demonstrates that while skills gaps abound in both technical and soft-skill areas, brands and organisations aren’t doing enough to address them. Almost half (43%) of leaders admit they have no training budget, which is undoubtedly holding their teams back. 

A call to executives to future-proof your business

Executives must recognise that financial considerations are only one aspect of their role. Those who genuinely buy into the process of digital transformation are more likely to facilitate change effectively and communicate its benefits to their teams. Embracing these priorities and investing in the necessary resources, whether it’s data privacy compliance, personalisation tools or workforce development, is essential for guiding their organisations toward a successful and adaptive future.

This article is written by Billy Loizou, Area VP, APAC, Amperity.

The insight is published as part of MARKETECH APAC’s thought leadership series under What’s NEXT 2023-2024. What’s NEXT 2023-2024 is a multi-platform industry initiative which features marketing and industry leaders in APAC sharing their marketing insights and predictions for the upcoming year.

United Kingdom – Airline Virgin Atlantic has tapped enterprise customer data platform Amperity to aid in the airline’s unification, management, and activation of its digital and transactional customer data in order to deliver personalised customer experiences and drive revenue growth.

Virgin Atlantic looks after a vast amount of customer data generated from digital touchpoints and offline transactions throughout the customer journey. As part of its ongoing data transformation, the travel company will use the CDP to create a personalised ecosystem and improve the digital experience.

Amperity’s platform uses patented machine learning algorithms to deliver industry-leading identity resolution, audience segmentation, and predictive analytics which allows Virgin Atlantic to create the most relevant content and communications for each customer. 

Tom Barber, head of data at Virgin Atlantic, said, “When it comes to innovating for our customers, Virgin Atlantic never stands still. We’re building a digital core at the heart of our business so that our customers benefit from a seamless shop, book and service experience for our flights and holidays, with an innate understanding of their preferences across the end-to-end journey.”

He added, “We’re excited to adopt Amperity to help us get to know our customers better than ever, supporting personalised and meaningful content and experiences at every touchpoint, with the advantage of consistent and secure first-party data and customer segmentation.”

Meanwhile, Barry Padgett, CEO at Amperity, commented, “Today, customer data is at the heart of any ambitious organisation, especially one that aspires to make every interaction feel more like it is a one-to-one experience versus a one-to-many approach. By tapping into Amperity, the platform for customer data, Virgin Atlantic will be able to take advantage of patented identity resolution, with strict governance and activation capabilities that will make experiences even more connected and relevant.”

New York – Customer data platform Amperity has been selected by beauty brand Shiseido Americas as the foundation of its first-party data strategy, to assist with creating connected and personalised digital customer experiences across all of its brands.

As consumer shopping preferences and behaviours evolve, Shiseido Americas will be using the assistance of Amperity in bringing a comprehensive solution to managing multiple data sources across its various brands to advance their marketing goals. 

In this partnership, Shiseido Americas will be aiming to target shoppers with affinity-based, personalised communications throughout their journey using Amperity’s patented, AI-powered identity resolution and unified customer profiles. 

Commenting on this collaboration, Kristin Morseman, senior vice-president of digital transformation at Shiseido Americas, said, “As an omnichannel retailer, we are laser-focused on understanding our customers and the channels they want to interact in, while ensuring we are delivering consistent customer experiences. With Amperity, we can unify and activate all of our customer data with the goal of creating a seamless omnichannel journey for our customers.”

Meanwhile, Barry Padgett, CEO at Amperity, mentioned, “The luxury beauty market is at the forefront of digital innovation, and they are finding unique ways of using data to gain a competitive edge in an omnichannel retail environment. By partnering with Amperity, Shiseido Americas now has the critical data foundation required to enable them to deliver real-time personalised customer experiences across in-store and digital worlds.”

The digital marketing landscape is highly competitive and rapidly growing more challenging by the day. The deprecation of third-party cookies and increasingly strict privacy regulations have posed significant challenges for brands trying to make an impact in marketing. Now, brands are looking to first-party data to give them what third-party data never could — sustainable, robust and privacy-compliant results.

At the recent MARKETECH APAC’s What’s NEXT 2023: Marketing in Asia Pacific conference, Matt Hallett, Head of Product Solutions at Amperity, and Teresa Sperti, Founder and Director of Arktic Fox, led a panel discussion, addressing the challenges that marketers are facing in today’s landscape and how they can best navigate them. Here are their insights.

The challenges: Why your marketing isn’t measuring up

What’s holding APAC marketers back from making time for measurement despite the critical need for data-driven marketing? According to Sperti, it’s three things.

“Teams are stretched thin and lack the bandwidth to effectively invest the appropriate time and effort in measuring performance. They’re trying to balance short-term and long-term needs of the business. And trying to determine how to optimise performance or adapt strategy,” she says. 

The second challenge tends to crop up when it’s time to actually measure. Sperti argues that when provided with mountains of data, marketers aren’t entirely sure what they should be measuring. “Marketers often lack clarity around deciphering the most appropriate measurement frameworks to utilise to demonstrate value,” she says. 

“That’s largely because each channel, particularly from a digital point of view, provides a plethora of metrics to measure performance. It can be difficult to determine what the most important metrics are — this can create paralysis in marketers.”

The third challenge, Sperti points out, is the skills gap. In Arktic Fox’s recent research, noted in its annual Arktic Fox Digital and Marketing In Focus Report, half of leaders say customer data strategy and better utilisation of first-party data is a key priority. In fact, 59% say they are still trying to embed a more data-driven approach to marketing, and half of respondents (55%) say building a customer data strategy and better utilising first-party data is a top priority. 

The rise of digital

At Amperity, Hallett shares that there’s a strong focus on helping brands unify customer data across disparate touchpoints. This empowers them to drive better experiences for customers at any time but especially during a time of change. 

After working with a plethora of world-leading brands, he says the most successful amongst them have the right people at the top who understand measurement and why it is important. “Knowing what to measure ultimately starts with the people, strategy and the boldness to keep measurement as a number one priority,” he says.

With the rise of digital, measurement is especially critical, Sperti adds. “The rise of digital has created more complexity as much as it’s created more clarity from a measurement point of view because we have so much data at our fingertips now,” she says.

“Whilst the issues around measurement have intensified given the challenges of today, they’ve always been around. Historically, we haven’t been as accountable as we’ve needed to be around measurement and performance as an industry.”

Hallett agrees, saying, “Measurement issues aren’t a new problem. It’s just that tightening privacy regulations and cookie deprecation are adding more pressure to the space.”

Navigating a new privacy-first marketing landscape 

Significant change is looming on the privacy regulatory front, and it appears that leveraging third-party cookies may no longer be an option after this year. Despite these shifts, in the Arktic Fox Digital and Marketing In Focus Report, when asked about the key priorities leaders have in the data and analytics space across the next 12–18 months, less than one in four (23%) suggested that a focus on improving their compliance with data privacy was a priority. 

Meanwhile, less than half (41%) of brands indicate they have their house in order when it comes to privacy and consent, suggesting many brands will be caught off-guard by the magnitude of change that will bear down on the industry. Concerningly, only 11% of businesses from the study say they have a ‘clear plan and path’ they are implementing when it comes to evolving and adapting to changes in privacy and consent.

This finding suggests that leaders may not fully grasp the extent of the changes that will occur and the urgency of preparing for them.

With Australia tightening its privacy laws, Sperti says it’s imperative for brands to rethink how they are going to leverage that data and discover what, if any, gaps they have in their data sets. 

“Marketers are going to need to adapt their measurement approaches accordingly to ensure they have a reliable data set from which to form and make decisions,” she points out. “It’s going to be a challenging transition off the back of our current market skills gap for those that are trying to build maturity and capability around data, to then have to tackle these really big challenges around measurement brought on by privacy and third-party cookie deprecation.”

Hallett agrees completely, but also admits that there’s a silver lining to all of this change — it’s making an even stronger case for a robust first-party data strategy. With third-party cookie deprecation, brands are trying to leverage first-party data in new and exciting ways,” he says. 

“My day in and day out is essentially spent helping customers build the connectors to make sure that first-party data can be leveraged in a secure, safe privacy-compliant way.”

Embrace imperfection to drive marketing results

As businesses continue to navigate the dynamic digital marketing landscape, the pressure to deliver results has only intensified. In a world where success is often measured in clicks, likes and views, it’s essential to understand the different types of metrics that exist and how to use them effectively.

The best way to do this, Hallett says, is to maintain a culture of fast iteration and celebrate failure as much as success. “Because this is a period of such intense change, you have to forget your pride and be willing to walk away from a campaign if it isn’t working,” he says. 

“Brands are feeling the pressure. Customers can go to a different brand or a different retailer with the click of a button. Everyone is feeling the pressures of Amazon. To thrive, it’s important to make sure that you’re out there, testing and learning as quickly as possible.”

Sperti agrees, saying the celebration of failure is vital. At the same time, she says, it’s just as important to start being comfortable with imperfection. “Decades back, marketers would work on a big TV ad, and they’d be really focused on driving that big, broad awareness – the kind that requires a lot of precision and perfection,” she says. 

“Today, we need to start getting really comfortable knowing that our measurement frameworks aren’t perfect from the get-go. Often perfectionism stops us. We won’t start measuring until we have the ‘Rolls Royce’ of performance measurement frameworks, which means we never start. And when we never start, we fail to learn and evolve from a marketing point of view. What we don’t optimise, we don’t improve.”

Today’s opportunity is paved in first-party data

Ultimately, this new digital landscape demands a new journey — one organisations and brands must navigate together to find their footing as the foundation built upon shady privacy practices and third-party cookies begins to crumble away. 

In a privacy-first world, all roads lead to first-party data. And it’s time for brands to run, not walk, towards getting their house in order. Brands who make the change to leveraging first-party data see net-positive outcomes not just in match rates, efficiencies, time and security but also in revenue. 

The brands that say these challenges are tomorrow’s problems are missing out on the opportunity available to them today. 

Australia – Even amidst cookie deprecation continually hanging over brands’ heads, organisations have shifted their priorities, with the focus moving away from the long-endured preparation for stricter data collection. According to a study by marketing advisory Arktic Fox, companies are now eyeing growth more than ever showing how the recent economic challenges have put considerable dent in their business trajectories. 

The Australia-focused study showed that growth agenda is one of the top priorities for 78% of Australia-based digital and marketing leaders and their teams in the year ahead. Only 55% cited developing first-party data strategy as their number one goal. 

Moreover, growth goals also trump brand development and embedding brand purpose (54%) in the hierarchy of company objectives. This is specifically for organisations in the market generating in excess of $100m in revenues. 

Growth has moved to top the priority list since last year, showing the reality of present economic conditions, said the report. 

When it comes to challenges, the current research showed that balancing short- and long-term priorities is the main struggle of two-thirds of respondents, demonstrating the balancing act leaders are facing to deliver short-term performance outcomes whilst building for the future. 

Further to Australian leaders’ predicaments, some 60% of respondents struggle with resourcing and budget constraints, showing that current times are asking marketing and digital heads to be more laser-focused on priority areas and investing for impact.

On the key objective of incorporating digital transformation across the business, Teresa Sperti, Arktic Fox’s director, said, “Today we still see far too many leaders believing that digital is someone’s role as opposed to digital capability needing to be embedded across the organisation to become central to the business strategy and operations.”

“When a separate digital or ecommerce function exists that is siloed from the rest of the business, it sends a message that understanding digital is not my job or responsibility and stifles teams’ ability to build capability and develop skills,” she added. 

The report was developed together with executive search firm Six Degrees and sponsored by martech Amperity. All in all, the 2023 Digital & Marketing In Focus study interviewed 230 marketing, digital, and e-commerce leaders across Australia within the period of November 2022 to February 2023.

Sydney, Australia – Automotive business Servco, one of the largest Toyota dealer groups in Australia, has tapped customer data platform (CDP) Amperity to handle its customer data strategy to achieve a comprehensive view of the customer and drive better insights for the company.

Servco has previously worked with Amperity in 2019 to connect siloed customer data across its businesses, create accurate 360-degree views of their customers and households, and get actionable business insights to better build customer trust.

The automotive business faced similar business challenges to that of its global headquarters but had the added challenge of having a number of legacy systems that came by way of an acquisition. With thaat, Servco needed an easy way to consolidate all of these disparate systems and make the data actionable. Amperity was able to provide a next-generation data foundation to unify all of Servco’s customer data into one centralised location.

Kane McHardy, chief operations officer at Servco Australia, said, “With Amperity, we’ve been able to successfully harmonise all of our data from across multiple disparate systems to achieve a unified view of each customer. This has provided us with more insights, enabling us to offer a more sophisticated approach to the utilisation of that data.”

He also added that in the longer run, they expect to see more engaging content, a better customer experience, greater retention and loyalty and less frustration for their employees.

Meanwhile, Billy Loizou, area vice president at Amperity, commented, “We’re delighted to see Servco achieve fantastic results on par with that of Global. You look at the three key things we want to influence and that’s business performance, employee productivity and customer experience, and we’ve been able to achieve all three with Servco.”

He added, “We couldn’t be more proud to help Servco drive the best results for its marketing and business campaigns with unified customer data — the foundation that powers every insight and action they take to deliver a powerful customer experience every time.”

Recently, Amperity has been tapped by Forever 21 parent company Authentic Brands Group and Reckitt to handle their customer data strategy as well.

Sydney, Australia – Authentic Brands Group (Authentic), the global brand development, marketing, entertainment, and digital platform that manages world-renowned brands such as Reebok, Forever 21, Nautica, and Van Heusen, has partnered with enterprise customer data platform (CDP) Amperity to become its cornerstone partner for data management strategy. The latter will help the parent firm unify its in-store and digital experiences for consumers across its portfolio of brands.

With a vast roster of more than 40 iconic and world-renowned brands, Authentic’s digital platform is powered by more than 200M consumer data files. Through the tie-up with Amperity, Authentic looks to activate data from multiple online and offline touchpoints, including pre-purchase, point-of-sale, and post-purchase customer care in order to create unified customer profiles. 

“We strive to provide the most optimal shopping experience for our consumers, and having a clean data foundation is essential,” said Adam Kronengold, Authentic’s chief digital officer. “Amperity’s platform allows us to resolve identities at scale across our portfolio and leverage data to inform brand and business development decisions.” 

Amperity will be bringing together Authentic’s diverse consumer data to enable a unified 360-degree view and comprehensive understanding of its brand consumers and enhance each of its brand’s digital engagement strategies.

“Authentic has amassed a vast and loyal customer base, spanning more than 40 renowned brands,” said Barry Padgett, CEO at Amperity. “The reality is that there are many CDPs, but not all of them are created equal. We’re honored Authentic has chosen our platform to help them to deliver personalised experiences for every individual customer, driving engagement and retention to unprecedented levels.”

Reckitt, the global consumer packaged goods company, has also recently partnered with Amperity to enhance its overall customer experience. Meanwhile, in February, the CDP expanded its presence in APAC by appointing its new business director and lead solutions consultant for the region.

Sydney, Australia – Amperity, the customer data platform (CDP) for enterprise consumer brands, has announced the appointment of Rian Smith as new business director and Sam Bessey as its new lead solutions consultant. The latest senior hires are expected to scale Amperity’s presence in the region amidst a period of rapid growth to meet the strong demand from brands looking to accelerate their digital transformation. 

Smith, formerly head of sales for APAC at Cheetah Digital, will be driving Amperity’s strategic new business initiatives and creating market demand. 

“With the surging demand for a CDP like Amperity in the region, there couldn’t be a better time to come on board and help local brands embrace their messy customer data to drive delightful customer experiences safely and securely while also achieving outstanding business results,” said Smith.

Meanwhile, Bessey, who was previously a senior manager at Accenture, brings a similar depth of experience to his new role. As lead solutions consultant, he will be assisting new and existing clients to unlock value from their customer data, using Amperity’s best-of-breed CDP. 

“As businesses adapt to the challenges and changes presented over the last few years and face new challenges in the year ahead, CDPs can help drive relevancy in real-time interactions to accelerate business growth,” commented Bessey.

“I’m thrilled to be on the ground, helping brands strike a balance between understanding how to engage with customers successfully while, simultaneously, respecting their data privacy to win in this new era of personalisation through the power of Amperity,” he added. 

Billy Loizou, area vice president at Amperity, shared their delight in welcoming the two seasoned hires and believes that both will help accelerate the opportunity brands have to serve their customers by bridging them to Amperity’s expertise.

“Brands are accelerating business transformation to better understand their customers, unlocking the ability to acquire more high-value customers, all whilst driving down their operational costs. The need for brand differentiation, seamless customer experiences, marketing measurement and data governance has transcended a CDP’s traditional function as a marketing tool to that of a central pillar of the entire enterprise software mix,” said Loizou.

New data has revealed the CDP market size is expected to grow from AU$7.18b in 2022 to AU$29.47b by 2027, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 32.4% during the forecast period. APAC is set to hold the highest CAGR which can be attributed to the heavy martech investments in the region resulting in increased demand for CDPs. 

Smith and Bessey are the latest to join Amperity in the APAC region, following its international expansion. The martech company recently opened a new office in the United Kingdom and a data centre in Ireland to complement its current presence in the former.

Washington, USA – Amperity, the enterprise customer data platform (CDP) for consumer brands, today announced Reckitt, the global consumer packaged goods company (CPG), has appointed it to maximise the value of its omnichannel customer data to deliver relevant, personalised customer experiences.

Combining first-party data and third-party data can have an immediate and significant impact on brands looking to truly understand their customers, and deliver highly-relevant experiences throughout the customer lifecycle. Amperity’s integrations with leading platforms like Amazon and Facebook aim to enable companies like Reckitt to reach more users while enriching advertising campaigns through Amperity’s insights on cross-channel behaviour, data sciences scores, and content affinities. 

“Historically, CPGs have had very little access to first-party data making it incredibly difficult to truly know the customer and deliver relevant omnichannel experiences,” said Barry Padgett, CEO at Amperity. “Reckitt understands the need to build their own customer relationships. By embracing a first-party data strategy, Reckitt now has access to accurate customer profiles that will exponentially strengthen their reach.”

Amperity has also announced this month its support for Amazon’s AWS for Advertising & Marketing initiative. The initiative features services and solutions purpose-built for the needs of different players in the industry, whereas Amperity has created a secure, modern data stack that would help brands to maximise the value of their first-party data.

The martech platform has also recently unveiled new key leaders. Megan McDonagh and Billy Loizou were named CMO and area vice president respectively.

I’ve long advocated that businesses need to take data protection seriously and any business that hasn’t already gotten its first-party data act together needs to prioritise that in 2023. Whether it’s Google getting rid of cookies, Apple making mobile ad tracking harder or governments introducing more legislation, things are only trending in one direction with data privacy. 

California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA), is going into full effect on 1 January 2023 set to clamp down on B2B data. Meanwhile The Australian Federal Government has recently announced harsher penalties for data breaches, including fines amounting to a whopping $AUD 50 million.

Empowering your business as data privacy tightens

When it comes to the impending deprecation of third-party cookies, ID resolution emerges as a valuable resource. By building a hearty, privacy-compliant, first-party data set, ID resolution provides a buffer against increasingly strict privacy policies that limit the use of third-party data. And even more, it helps improve marketing performance and ROI too with smart segmentation, which helps brands cut down on redundancies.

Data clean rooms (DCRs) can also supply advertisers with access to information they otherwise wouldn’t have. And, especially with the impending demise of third-party cookies, every piece of information is gold. 

As privacy rules become stricter, DCRs will skyrocket in popularity. In fact, recent predictions indicate that by 2023, 80% of advertisers with media buying budgets over $1 billion will use DCRs.

However, a DCR is only an extension of a first-party data strategy. Connecting a CDP to a DCR allows first-party data to be anonymised and analysed alongside third-party sources. A CDP can also receive data from the DCR in the form of segments or targeted audiences it can then share with connected marketing platforms for activation.

Think of it this way: You can use Venmo or PayPal without a checking account attached to it, but it’s a much better experience (with better outcomes) if they are connected. Together, a DCR and a CDP allow organisations to manage, process and analyse their data in a way that’s efficient, safe and compliant.

Unlocking the value of customer data to drive business growth

Marketing budgets are under increased pressure. Businesses are continuing to focus on retaining their existing customers rather than spending big to acquire new ones. In relation to e-commerce, it’s not so much that consumers have stopped spending altogether – they are just buying different things. For instance, they’re now picking up a $30 lipstick every month rather than a $60 facial cream.

With supply chains being what they are, it’s crucial to pick up shifts in consumer preferences ASAP. Comprehensive, readily accessible, first-party data also makes it easier for businesses to understand what their customers want when they are feeling unsettled and financially stressed.

This means it’s more crucial than ever to remember customer metrics drive business metrics. Businesses will be more reliant than ever on a first-party data strategy next year to hold on to customers and remain one step ahead of their ever-evolving purchasing habits. 

It’s also important to remember customer data isn’t just for marketers. After building a unified customer database, that data is then available to advertisers, marketers, analysts, IT operations teams and product developers. This is precisely what it means to be customer-centric — using your customer data to inform all aspects of the business, not a single channel or department. When everyone shares the same understanding of customers, the business is equipped to provide the best experiences and the most impactful strategies for long-term growth.

Making the most of ‘messy’ data to make 2023 a success

While centralised data storage systems like warehouses and lakes are great ways to keep all the data together, especially at the scale most enterprises deal with (we’re talking hundreds of billions of data points), they don’t organise and cleanse large volumes of ‘messy’ data so that you can make the most out of it. 

It’s far from a ‘one and done’ solution. That’s where a CDP comes in. It powers up your data warehouse or data lake by:

  1. Cleaning customer data for superior ID resolution, providing teams answers to key questions about customer behaviour
  2. Providing built-in attributes that neatly lay out all the information needed to gain a picture of each customer, so you can perform advanced segmentation to find and reach the right audiences for a given campaign
  3. Managing workflows to activate use cases and bring the data to life
  4. Speeding up time to insights by providing access for non-technical teams
  5. Feeding data seamlessly into a range of different tools

2023 is the year for brands and organisations to embrace a ‘better together’ mentality when it comes to their data needs. 

This article is written by Billy Loizou, area vice president of Amperity.

The insight is published as part of MARKETECH APAC’s thought leadership series under What’s NEXT 2023. What’s NEXT 2023 is a multi-platform industry initiative which features marketing and industry leaders in APAC sharing their marketing insights and predictions for the upcoming year.

If you are a marketing leader and have insights that you’d like to share on upcoming trends and practices in marketing, please reach out to [email protected] for an opportunity to be part of the series.