June 25, 2025
Third Party Data Regulations
Zero and First Party Data Strategies
Data for Channel Practices
Painting Your Data
At the heart of any digital strategy is a set of data points. They talk to each other, intercept each other, and form a kaleidoscope of opportunities for growth.
As new platforms and digitization have transformed the industry, avatar strategies have become a limited, smaller tactic related to marketing initiatives. It’s now evolved into how data formulates into opportunities.
Business objectives including an infrastructure where data is a central driver also have more opportunities to scale business. The more data you have, the easier it is to target, merge channels, work across initiatives, and to build out stronger campaigns.
The way that we've been using data is changing. With the increased concern around privacy, the way third-party data is pulled and collected is now changing our ways of working.
What Is It: Third-party data is information collected by external organizations, packaged up and sold to marketers to be used in campaigns and to help with optimizations.
Its Use in Marketing: The use of third party data can help marketers with lookalike audiences, personalization from behaviors and demographic traits. It serves to short cut several pieces of data that are not immediately available through other marketing practices.
Problems with Third Party Data: While third-party data offers insights to optimize against, it also raises concerns with privacy and regulations. 2025 is seeing major shifts with third party data, specifically because it doesn’t legitimately connect to consumer behavior.
As a result of the data privacy controversies, this year has seen a massive shift in how third party data is used.
The shift out of third party data is pushing us back to the basics of business and marketing. The need of marketers is to gather data and to have enough information to cluster larger groups together for targeting purposes. But without accessibility to certain pieces of third party data, relationship building comes back into the picture of the strategy.
What this is resulting in is re-looking the types of data we can gather and how this is effectively used in segmentation and targeting practices.
The data that can be used is inclusive of the following points:
By combining these base layers of information, it shifts the footprint of marketing and sending practices, offering more expansive areas of growth.
With the foundation of data types, it’s possible to change your marketing target into more direct relationships with others. This means that your ability to target groups of people changes based on the data that is used, allowing you to optimize your marketing initiatives.
Platforms are following with better use of data and integration of zero and first party data. For marketers, this gives extra opportunities to target at a deeper level.
By the Platform: Meta and Google Ads are unlocking new opportunities for data. They are giving the key to first-party data integrations for their platforms. This allows marketers to use privacy-enhanced measurement tools as well as targeting tactics of data marketers have collected.
Strategies for paid are being lifted with reliable and compliant user data, offering better leverage for zero and first party data.
* Meta, Google, and TikTok allow users to upload CRM data and to generate audiences from outside data that is collected
* Behavioral signals, such as Meta’s new Signals Gateway, is allowing marketers to rely more on first-party data from interactions.
* Lookalike audiences and personalization of creative can be utilized with these platforms to generate strategies that are more targeted.
What It Means for Marketing Strategies: While third-party data was used to optimize broad targets, zero and first party data changes the focus. Marketing with first-party data also supports measurements with direct activities or profiles to result in targeted results.
For paid ads, targeted audiences, behavioral signals, and personalization all add into a deeper and focused approach to ads, leading to strategies that are driven by known data points.
By the Platform: Compliance of data in retention channels has been in place for a longer time, specifically related to opt-in requirements and regulations. But with the build in of third-party data not being reliable, retention channels are also integrating deeper zero to first party data.
What It Means for Marketing Strategies:
* Loyalty programs are becoming more popular with the rise in collecting data.
* Quizzes, surveys, and collections of data are moving back in as more data means more targeting in the retention channel.
* Building deeper layers of first-party data based on clusters of information on a website are becoming even more important as a central strategy for retention.
* CDPs that integrated third-party data are now required to leverage deeper permission layers and to integrate third and first party data together.
For CDPs, the movement away from third-party data is also changing sources and integrating target groups. For strategists, this means working more with zero and first-party data in the CDPs while making sure data is clean as deeper targeting moves to the forefront.
As changes in platforms and industry trends mean that the overall marketing landscape is evolving, personalized, targeted initiatives are taking over strategic initiatives. Data now empowers marketers to paint a more vivid and precise picture of their audiences, enabling both tactical targeting and broader strategic efforts that build stronger personal relationships. Amidst this transformation, brands must also adapt to emerging restrictions and opportunities, finding new ways to thrive in the shifting digital ecosystem.
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