Tune in to episode 14 of AdTech | AlikeAudience, where the Head of South East Asia, LiveRamp Seow Ping Tan, and AlikeAudience Co-founder Bosco Lam talk about the importance of using first-party data in a privacy-compliant manner as advertisers transition to a post-cookie world in digital advertising, with business and technology journalist Duncan Craig.
Tune in to get intriguing insights on:
- • Industry’s response to Google’s announcement regarding a cookieless future in digital advertising.
- • Importance of collaborating on first-party data to ensure continuity, mutual benefit, and the creation of business value.
- • The complexity of data collaboration and the need for privacy, legality, and consumer rights respect in a cookieless world.
- • Importance of privacy, consent, and clear purposes in data collaboration for brands and the need for respecting customer rights.
- • Transition to a post-cookie world, privacy compliance, and the need for privacy by design.
- • Importance of secure data collaboration, clean rooms, and privacy measures in marketing.
- • Use cases of data collaboration, insights, measurement, and the complex relationship between CPG brands and retailers.
- • Multi-faceted collaboration between brands, retailers, and intra-company collaboration, emphasizing the need for strong internal champions and privacy considerations.
- • Inter-departmental data collaboration enhances consumer journey insights and operations efficiency.
Hello from AdTech | AlikeAudience
Duncan Craig: Hello, and welcome to the AdTech with AlikeAudience podcast. This podcast is brought to you by AlikeAudience, the premium audience-targeting company with high-performing mobile audience segments. Every month we spotlight leading executives, CEOs and marketers from industry-leading companies. My name is Duncan Craig. I’ve been a business and technology journalist in the APAC region for a decade and worked in AdTech content and comms since 2013. We are aiming to speak to as many interesting people in the AdTech digital marketing and advertising industry across half the world.
Guests for this Episode: Seow Ping Tan and Bosco Lam
Duncan Craig: So welcome to episode 14 of the AdTech with AlikeAudience Podcast. Today, we have Seow Ping, Head of South East Asia for LiveRamp, the data collaboration platform of choice for the world’s most innovative companies. We look forward to learning today about how LiveRamp is approaching digital advertising in the new world of addressability, identity, and collaboration. And joining us once again is Bosco Lam, the co-founder of AlikeAudience and CEO. Bosco is an addressability working member of the IAB tech lab in the US, has expertise in behavioral economics and consumer data, and is passionate about empowering marketers to reach the target customers through the connection of data and media while also developing privacy-safe audience-targeting solutions. Bosco, Seow Ping, welcome to the AlikeAudience AdTech podcast.
Seow Ping Tan: Thank you. It’s great to be here.
Bosco Lam: Thank you, Duncan. And our pleasure to have Seow Ping with us today.
Seow Ping Tan: Thank you.
A cookieless future in digital advertising
Duncan Craig: Seow Ping, thanks for your time again. I guess there’s a lot to digest, about LiveRamp and your vision and also your personal vision on where the market is going, whether it be identity or data clean rooms, and addressable advertising. You’ve been in the data space for a long time. Where do you think we’re at right now?
Seow Ping Tan: I think, you know, at the moment, given, kind of, Google’s announcement, quite a lot of people are, kind of, looking for solutions to make sure that they are able to continue to do what they’re currently doing. And I do think that, I’m talking about cookieless for a while now, and I think the evolution to looking at how we collaborate data, how, because first-party data is going to become very important, how do people elaborate with each other to make sure that, one, there is continuity, two, there is a mutual benefit, there is a win-win, and three, how do they generate, kind of, the business value out of that collaboration.
Complexity of data collaboration and the need for privacy
Bosco Lam: Interesting. Seow Ping, you mentioned about data collaboration. I think we want to set the stage here today that everyone knows about the value of data collaboration. But each of us is kind of afraid, or not sure, they’re uncertain how to collaborate in, first of all, privacy-friendly way, legal way, and also to respect the rights of each consumer. Actually cookieless is only, everyone has been talking about it for years. And that is only a subset of identities, right? We have names, addresses and identities.
And also, identities is only one of many attributes or columns, I would say, when we come into data collaboration. Normally identities, we may have transactional data, and we have other sensitive information. And if we zoom out even further, it is not only about advertising, but you know, today when we train our AI model, we also need a lot of first-party data in that practice. So it is an interesting topic, how we come across with first-party data, how we collaborate in a more restrictive way, I think that will be a good stage for today’s conversation.
Seow Ping Tan: Absolutely.
Importance of privacy, consent, and clear purposes in data collaboration for brands
Duncan Craig: Thank you very much. I guess it could be a confusing landscape. Seow Ping, what about your role professionally? Are you providing to brands and advertisers trying to navigate this feature?
Seow Ping Tan: Well, I mean, I think, you know, Bosco mentioned about privacy. And obviously when you’re preparing for cookieless, and you actually want to embark into, you know, because I think the thing is, when you have your first-party data, you only know as much as you know about the customer in your own space, right? So how do you gain more insights, etc. So This is about collaborating with partners out there, who may be able to give you more insights about your customer. But obviously, when doing this, privacy is of utmost importance. We’re going to make sure that we respect the privacy of our customers. And I think that’s something that I’m passionate about, I think, in my role in LiveRamp, it’s something that we’re helping brands prepare for that and knowing, kind of, how to make sure that you get the right consent from your customers, and also making sure you have the right infrastructure to be able to help you facilitate that collaboration. And make sure that when there is an exchange as an exchange in value.
Bosco Lam: Seow Ping, you mentioned a very good point about the purpose of that consent, right? And I think the brand or the retailers have to deliver a clear purpose of what sort of consents that they are acquiring, and what sort of service of value-add they’re returning to the consumers. So actually I came across a few cases, like the brand, they are already customer support, like any complaints, or any delivery services, there are some legit consent to collect, maybe phone number, delivery address, but you have to respect that purpose, you cannot extend these consents with other uses of being maybe to drip marketing, third-party sharing, unless you also deliver a clear message, why you have to acquire additional purposes. And once the consumer agrees and opt-in to this extended consents, then you are able to perform that actions. So yeah, this is actually a good point that brands and retailers today have to be aware of when listening is privacy rights.
Seow Ping Tan: Yeah. Absolutely.
Transition to a post-cookie world, privacy compliance, and the need for privacy by design
Duncan Craig: Interesting. It’s a very complex topic. Of course, we are moving into, finally, a post-cookie world. I know Bosco you think it’s a, we’ve got to move on beyond that. Because Mozilla and Safari are gone. And Chrome will join that lack of addressability challenge, do you think that we’re going to rapidly move into a post cookie solutions world?
Bosco Lam: I think at the end of the day, when two enterprises come hand in hand to collaborate on data, obviously, they need a common key, such that they will join data in certain ways. Obviously, we can talk about the Privacy Enhancing Technologies later on in details how to visit the store and in a privacy-friendly way. But at the end of the day, there needs to be some common keys and two parties coming into the game. Maybe, Seow Ping, you have some ideas on that.
Seow Ping Tan: You’re rightly pointing out the reality is already 40% of the web is already cookieless, right? So actually, there are opportunities right now that if you tap to a cookieless solution, you can actually benefit from reaching this 40% that you would never have gotten. So it already is your, kind of, one business value that you can bring immediately if you’re looking at cookieless solution. But I think the reality is that Google’s already announced the timelines. So people are, kind of, moving, accepting the fact that you have to do it. And now it’s like, what’s beyond that? How do we just look at a solution? But how do we make sure that the solution is going to bring us continuity in the value that is going to be able to generate to the business? So I think Bosco made a point about an identifier, obviously, first-party data is important and to collaborate on first-party data, we need to make sure that there are privacy compliance. No PII is shared. I think the technology that enables that and I think that the idea is also not to be able to identify it down to the segment of one, right, you should make sure that it’s a segment of customers, and you’re not identifying somebody to that’s Bosco Lam. And that’s important to make sure that you have a solution in place where it’s inherently privacy by design, right? So the solution is to have privacy as part of all of its aspects of design.
Using data collaboration for better customer experiences
Duncan Craig: Yeah, absolutely. We’re clearly moving towards, you could call it the anonymized web or the consent platform where you could argue that. At the same time, We have also seen an explosion in data clean room, that space, maybe last two or three years. Though, you could argue in the last six months, people are now talking more about collaboration rather than cleanrooms. You have been in the data space a long time, Seow Ping. How do you see what’s happening right now? And what do you think the key issues are that advertisers need to think about?
Seow Ping Tan: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s an interesting time to be in. Because before, it was just about how do you use first-party data for your own marketing, right? So now it’s about how do I use first-party data in collaboration with partners out there? I think what’s important is, the ‘so what’ after that, right, what do you do with that data? What do you do after you’ve shared and you’ve exchanged insights? Because ultimately, the aim needs to be about understanding your customers better, and bringing better customer experiences. And end of the day, it’s about also how do you use that to make sure that you’re bringing value back to the customer as well as to the organization.
So I think that ‘so what’ is are you using the insights for activations, for measurement to enrich your understanding about customer so that you can service them better? So I think that piece of ‘so what’ after you’ve done that collaboration is going to be key, and you need to use it in a way that’s going to bring value back to the customer. Ultimately, the customer is at the center of all of this.
Importance of secure data collaboration and clean rooms
Duncan Craig: Thank you. Bosco, I’m sure you got some views on this, my friend.
Bosco Lam: Yeah, actually, I want to add to that ‘so what’ scenario once that before, especially in the head of CMOs, obviously, over that case, they know about the value of data elaboration, but the risk seen is first legal. In the past, without clean rooms, mostly the data collaboration started by contract. If there are breaches, then what will be the compensation is, but once the data is leaked, that’s it. And that reputation, the cause of all this created a lot of concerns, right, from a CMOs point of view. They are not well trained as lawyers or legals. So that’s why going back to the point, before clean rooms happens, a lot of these data collaboration is only bounded by an equal contracts. That is more like aftermath, how you’re going to clean up the mess. And now we are creating a technology that, by default, you control who have more access to what data and in what ways to that data being reviewed to external parties.
And this is well-described and well-designed before any real data is being shared. So I think, now the game plan is to play a more defensive way, I think. In the past, we were only governed by legal contracts. But now we have a more active approach in terms of who and what, to what level, we want to share the data. So I think it really helps a lot of CMOs out there. They do not need to be a data privacy officers. They don’t need to be a CIO. And they can still enjoy the benefits in a more secured way to collaborate on data.
Duncan Craig: Thank you, Bosco. That is a very real-world story for us here in Australia. Because two years ago, right now you have a major telecoms carrier had a major customer data breach, millions of data points and private files. And the reputation loss is significant. Again, it comes down to software, and web, but mostly where are you storing and sharing that data? So that’s a real-world risk. I would agree with that 100%.
Bosco Lam: I want to add one point. So we can also conceptually think clean room is more than only two parties dumping the data in it. There’s a more defined, like a log sheet about all and when all this access is going through. So when there’s an incident, or you want to trace all the way back, this is actually a good proof points about all these collaboration details.
Seow Ping Tan: I think it’s also fundamentally when you choose a partner for a collaboration platform, or one of the aspects as you’re choosing partners to make sure that privacy and that, you know, that aspect is taken into account. And generally then, do you actually have to reveal all of your personal information? Or do you use anonymized ID to actually do the match? But there are solutions, and I think that’s quite important, because I think by having, kind of, that layer, to your point, it takes the, kind of, heat of the CMO to say, oh, it’s, you know, there’s no sharing PII. It’s much on an identifier. So it’s privacy by design and all that. So I think that it’s a very important thing.
Bosco Lam: And I also want to add another point, that is, when two companies come to the collaboration in the past, when we have that concept of data sharing, and it’s kind of scary, right? I give you my Excel, I give them my databases, and you read everything line by line. Right now with a clean room, or, I would say, in general technology, right, That will enable two parties first, they don’t need to share anything out. Maybe they have a helicopter view of the data schema, like what columns you have, what data types you have. And then we can add in a lot more like privacy layer, or differential privacy, which we can aggregate a lot more insights and to only dish on certain insights that no reverse engineer is allowed. So you can actually protect individual data, you can protect the data owner, again, and also protect the risk of oversharing individual information. So you’re not singling out any signal or any footprints of a consumer.
But overall, you can still extract the business value from aggregator point of view. So I think this is what drives us ahead and innovate from a data collaboration point of view, we don’t need to need to book a lab. You’ve made a purchase at the coffee shop $5 today, but we may have aggregate view, maybe 10% of your customers is top spenders in coffee, that is maybe adequate enough for your attribution use case. Maybe for your segmentation use case or for your market researchers’ case.
Use cases of data collaboration, insights and measurement
Duncan Craig: Interesting use cases. That’s we’re going to see a lot more use cases coming up, a lot more innovation, no doubt Bosco. Thanks, great point. Seow Ping, I guess, for LiveRamp and our brands collaborating with these new identifiers, guess the company has its own solution in the marketplace. Do you want to speak to that at all?
Seow Ping Tan: I think brands are onboarding, coming on board. Obviously, as I said their knowledge of their customers is only what they know. So you know, I think, you know, a classic is you got a CPG brand who collaborate with a retailer to get more insights about who and what are my customers buying? What other products are my customers buying? How are they spending, etc. So I think some of this is to get more insights. So one of the use cases to get, kind of, to share insights to get more insights. But ultimately, I think the Insights is how do we then use the insights to generate greater value for me, my brand as well, as obviously, for my partner, who’s shared me, you know, who’s given me that data. So it’s also for the retailer. So that, and I think the other area that we also in terms of collaboration is in measurement. I think with a lot of given, a lot of spend, with data things are a lot, our spends is a lot, is very measurable. So it’s again, it’s what’s the impact of my the investment that I’ve made. I think this involves, one is obviously if I go back to the CPG and retail example. CPG and retailer, obviously, I’ve invested X amount in media, I’ve driven that amount of return, but also I’ve placed media, I’ve placed at outside in the ecosystem, how do I get some of those exposure back or some of those responses, how my customers responding to the ads that are placed, or my messaging or my offer? I think we combine all of that, that’s great insight to, one is to help you measure kind of the effectiveness of the campaign, two is also how do I then use that to test, iterate, and make sure that I optimize? The next time around, I run the campaign, or the next time, my next investment is with the retailer.
Bosco Lam: Interesting because like we measure our CPG brands, we also measure retailers. Actually, I’m always curious how this love-and-hate relationship is happening? Well, maybe for CPG, they rely a lot on retailers. And for some certain brands, they may also have their own brands.com right? They have their own track to consumers Channel. In the meantime, they will still allow retailers for some distributions. Seow Ping, do you think this clever technology would actually facilitate this love-and-hate relationship? So they come on board ready to collaborate on data versus in the past? Two parties or two acetate to collaborate on that?
Seow Ping Tan: I mean, yeah, I think it’s interesting because that’s worked in the retail business as well. So yes, it’s a love-hate relationship. But end of the day, I think you recognize that as much as we negotiate a restriction, but in coming together, actually can drive a lot more value to each other as well as, ultimately, end of the day to the customers. It’s an interesting and kind of ever-fiction, kind of, fictional relationship. So yeah.
Multi-faceted collaboration with a focus on internal champions and privacy
Bosco Lam: So the trade sellers in retailers now wear a lot more hats, right? there. Yeah, the legal team, the marketing team?
Seow Ping Tan: Well, I mean, I think we see the trade relationship, it’s about how much are you going to help me sell through? I think where we talk about retailers also, other retailers trying to get some brand money from the brands, how do you use the retail space, or the retailers, kind of, audiences or their their customers, as a brand building exercise. So I think it’s definitely a win-win relationship for both. And I think, also to extend that beyond just marketing, which if you think about, kind of, assortment in-store distribution, logistics, I mean, this partnership, this collaboration, beyond just transaction, data could extend to, kind of, those other more operational aspects. I mean, the extent of collaboration is actually huge. It could impact, kind of, other aspects of the business as well.
Bosco Lam: Interesting. I actually came across another use case, that is intra-company collaboration, right. So just now I mentioned, like brand.com, you have your direct-to-consumer brand. Maybe you have another sub-brand that rely on retailers. Yeah. So actually, a mother group may have a few sister brands that may compete in certain level. How does it work, like for intra-company data clean room collaboration?
Seow Ping Tan: Yeah, I mean, you’re right, because if you look at a lot of the big groups, today, they have competing brands. And I mean, there is obviously strategic reasons why they have competing brands. But I think one of the, so my role at LiveRamp, we work with a lot of organizations also to use the solution to facilitate that sharing of data between two competing brands within the organization. I mean, end of the day as the big, kind of, mother organization, my ability to bring all insights to understand about one customer across all of my brands supersedes, kind of, the brand’s individual, kind of, if I may call it selfishness not to share the data, right? But then how do you facilitate that sharing in a way that’s comfortable for both the brand so to the point we brought, you know, we mentioned earlier, it’s about making sure there are privacy factors in place, permissioning, you don’t share everything you share what you need to share, and all of those factors in place so that the brand themselves are comfortable sharing, I mean by sharing, again, is for the greater good. It actually is a win-win relationship.
Bosco Lam: So there needs to be really strong internal champion to drive.
Seow Ping Tan: Absolutely. And often, I think a lot of this needs to be from the top right. It has to be a direction to share. That’s often the case, kind of, to make sure that organizations do it and do it effectively.
Inter-departmental data collaboration improves consumer insights and operations
Bosco Lam: Actually, it goes beyond CMOs, right, to sub-brands, because we mentioned one dimension is brand and brand collaboration. But another dimension could be cross-department, right? You may have a customer support department that have your identities, filling their complaints or returns, while in your front-end sales team, you may have your coupons and promotion. How we join the dots for this consumer journey is actually another use case of intercompany data collaboration, right? So you can join a sales data, you can join a customer support data, you can join a promotional data, such that you can formulate a full view of your existing customer’s behavior.
Seow Ping Tan: Yes, absolutely. And again, is you know, you can understand how the customers are behaving informs of how if you’re in a store, or you know, or even even if you’re a dotcom business, how you should be, how often you should be replenishing, you know, your assortment, what sort of assortment you carry at what location, extending to logistics, how you organize it. I think there’s a fast, you know, kind of like, scope of collaboration.
Bosco Lam: Well, that is a huge workload.
Seow Ping Tan: Absolutely. Well, probably we have technology to support.
Challenges in executing innovation and exploring collaboration possibilities
Duncan Craig: That’s the first thing, set of viewpoints team. All I can say is the retail sector globally is huge as we know, and it seems to be driving a lot of this innovation. There’s need to have first-party data set up properly and also understand what the consumers want, like you say, Seow Ping, consumers are now at the center of the discussion. There are I guess there are also tons of challenges and interesting developments ahead, the space of innovation that you’re talking about, Bosco, when you were in Greece. I guess the last question is for Bosco first. What do you think the market will be talking about and focusing on in the next two years across the broad depth of topics we touched on today?
Bosco Lam: I think the challenges would be, we have a huge scope of use cases, we rethink big. But in terms of execution, right, how we get our resources, how we prioritize with all these pieces and formulate the big picture, I think there’s still some gaps in between. Obviously, we need to have CIO, Chief Legal Officer, CMOs, all the business use case buy-in. And I think the resources and also the parties has to formulate a good plan before we execute this. So yeah, in general, I would say think big while on down to earth how to execute. There are still gaps in between. What do you think Seow Ping?
Seow Ping Tan: Yeah, I agree. I think, I mean, suddenly, the next two years, you know, you’re kind of onboarding, you’re getting, kind of, getting things up. But I think it’s really then about exploring the possibilities, right? So, you know, what can be done thinking creatively about what the solutions are? What methods of collaboration, who I collaborate with? What are the more important use cases that I’m collaborating with? And to your point is, how do we make sure that we make that happen? And you know, sort of like, again, test, iterate, you know, kind of repeat and make sure that we’re efficient in that. I think it’ll be an interesting time of exploring, exploring kind of the possibilities, the use cases, exploring different, try and testing different things. It’s a great period of innovation.
Subscribe and Stay Tuned!
Duncan Craig: Thank you. Well, thank you very much, Seow Ping, Bosco. That was fascinating. Appreciate that. And just to wrap up for our audience, thank you so much for listening. To find the show notes, the transcripts, and more information about AlikeAudience’s segment offerings, just jump onto our website, www.alikeaudience.com. And to our listeners, if you enjoyed that episode, don’t forget to hit subscribe, and leave us a review. We’ll catch you in the next session. Thank you very much.
