Getting up close and personal with data

Future-proofing against further changes is key. This was at the heart of the 2024 strategy unveiled by the Yahoo advertising team at the recent Yahoo Newfront held across Australia and Southeast Asia.

Through our conversations with marketers, one thing sticks out - while many have figured out how to amass troves of first-party data from their consumers, many do not have the right plan and resources to deliver on business goals. As an adtech partner and publisher consulting daily with media agencies, we can confidently say that first-party customer data is not being used to its full potential, or flowing downstream from direct marketing or content management systems to digital advertising campaigns. Only the visionary few have this aspect nailed down.

Many have recognized that they need to play catch-up - 55% of chief data officers (CDOs) say they still adopt a mostly manual approach to discovering data in their enterprise, and only 28% have a strategy to take advantage of it.

Marketers and agencies often bear the brunt of these challenges — tasked to deliver effectiveness and efficient spend on advertising dollars. Yet they often have limited visibility into ongoing developments by tech giants, restricted access to essential data, and lack technology tools to spearhead data-led transformation.

Approaches that foster effective data collaboration and data fluency, alongside organization-wide alignment of shared objectives and key results are crucial. As data moves from a nice-to-have commodity to a marketer’s most valuable tool, having the right partners makes all the difference.

Data interoperability for industry-wide growth

As one of the key focuses at Yahoo, towards a better internet and digital advertising industry, we have invested significantly in multi-market partnerships that break down walls and strengthen data utilization for marketers industry-wide. This includes Yahoo’s recent partnerships with Segment by Twilio, Tealium and LiveRamp that scale addressability, enhance reach, and support more seamless transactions across the open web.

In turn, brands and marketers are able to activate their data through the Yahoo DSP at scale across different protocols, standards, formats, and platforms, while ensuring data custodianship and consumer privacy. With the addition of supply-side interoperability with RampID and the Ad Traffic Solution (ATS), more addressable scale will be on offer.

Yahoo ConnectID’s interoperability ensures that a brand’s first-party data plays well with external media and adtech platforms – allowing them to leverage their partners’ data, inventory and technology to drive privacy-centric, effective and personalized full-funnel campaigns.

Partnerships that reach audiences across all environments

Today, 30% of all inventory is already non-addressable, and that figure is estimated to grow to 75% by 2024. While there have been many solutions tailored to the ID-constrained world, these typically cater to a specific inventory type and differentiate between addressable and non-addressable environments.

This further emphasizes the need for marketers to work on an integrated approach with partners throughout the ecosystem to reach the unaddressable, in addition to their own first-party database, with relevant experiences and touchpoints.

At Yahoo Newfront, we revealed how we’re uniquely solving for targeting and measurement in the non-addressable internet. Our holistic approach with Yahoo Identity Solutions allows marketers to reach their audiences across all environments within a single solution on the Yahoo DSP. Yahoo’s Next-Gen Solutions takes an AI-based approach - leveraging billions of real-time signals to infer high-quality audiences when identity isn’t available, complementing Yahoo ConnectID’s hashed, opt-in, and consent-based one-to-one relationships.

Total measurement for performance

Results, KPIs, metrics, impressions, clicks - these are just some of the ways we measure the success of marketing. Marketers today face increasing pressure to stretch their budgets and improve performance against business objectives. Yet they often lack the information they need to validate the impact of their omnichannel investments and uncover actionable insights across channels and platforms to drive results.

Yahoo’s omnichannel measurement suite gives brands the insights they need to move beyond digital metrics and deliver business outcomes. Marketers can get in-flight, path-to-conversion, and post-campaign insights across all digital formats and channels within a centralized platform – allowing them to focus on harnessing efficiency and maximizing their working media.

It goes beyond unifying measurement within the fragmented landscape and providing more transparency. At Yahoo Newfront, we announced that Yahoo now has the largest availability of attention measurement partnerships for our region — beginning with Adelaide available globally, and Amplified Intelligence and Playground XYZ in Australia. This helps marketers measure the real value of what is being put in front of people’s eyes – a larger and complete picture of the customer journey.

Unpacked by Flybuys, Near, Lucid by Cint, Milieu- these are just some of Yahoo’s other partnerships that help marketers close the loop between offline and online sales, store visits, sales lift attribution and brand lift.

We know that data collaboration drives growth and innovation - and truly connected partnerships across the industry will create win-win-win opportunities for all players, whether publishers, brands and agencies, or technology partners.

In the changing digital landscape, Yahoo holds the map to navigate these shifts and help brands through the wilderness. Our access to an incredible wealth of first-party data, backed by partnerships, offer practical ways to reach audiences in addressable and identity-less environments, while still providing powerful and quantifiable results.

As we look ahead, our sole focus is helping marketers step into the future with confidence. And we’re taking an active approach, working closely with our agency partners and industry bodies to understand what’s happening, drive data fluency and instill privacy by design.