Brian Kotlyar, from Hightouch, explains the following: 

“All the companies, and I include media companies in this are shifting towards a first-party data mindset. What data do I have oversight and insight into and do I have permission and consent for? And now the challenge becomes, okay, great.

How do I organize that information? And, a data warehouse is just a fancy term for those of us that are not like analysts by trade, which I am not. If you imagine a giant spreadsheet with just thousands of worksheets, That’s basically all it is and that can do simple view lookups and compares across spreadsheets, but just imagine it at this incredible scale.

The technology’s much more accessible, much easier to use, and it’s getting more that way every day. And just again, go back to my simple framing here. You need to start collecting this information. You need to start dumping it into a central place where you can manage the permissions, consent, and quality of it.

And then you need to start looking at it to understand what’s there. Now the cool thing is just as we’re all doing that, the media companies and the publishers are doing the same thing. New York Times is doing that with all their data as your example. Best Buy is doing that with all its data. Small e-commerce companies are doing that with all data.

Everyone is in the mass beginning to do this more and more because they have to. The cookies are going away over time, and the quality of the data associated with those cookies is getting worse. This starts to introduce some really neat stuff you can start to do to overcome these obstacles. 

One of the products we’ve made and I don’t mean to make this a plug, I wanna use it to explain that we actually have a product that helps people do that comparison and what we call match boosting. It’s looking at your data and boosting the match rate to companies like New York Times or companies like Facebook or whatever to find your people over there.

And it’s the idea of this bridging technology between what we used to have, which is just showing up at New York Times with a bundle of cash and they’ll give you access to the audience you want. That’s not possible anymore. Now you have to show up to them with some data of your own, and you can use that data to find people reading the New York Times and elsewhere.

And so a whole new ecosystem of capabilities needs to emerge to facilitate that. But it starts with you as a marketer having some data.”

Continue listening by clicking the link to the full podcast audio episode.