The marketers’ map: How data empowered brands find consumers in choppy cost-of-living seas

Marketers are the bridge between brands and consumers. They see firsthand which messages, creatives and channels resonate with their target audiences. As the ongoing cost-of-living crisis persists and disrupts once-stable brand loyalties, marketers’ insights are crucial to keeping the consumer at the heart of a brand’s efforts, delivering the products and services they need at a price point that satisfies both parties.

Maintaining this vital connection has been a struggle in recent years, as marketers’ view of consumers has been clouded through signal loss and behaviours changing faster than data can keep up with. This is all set to change, as supply-side signals, data collaboration and identity provide an accurate and private map of consumer activity across the sprawling media ecosystem. 

From signal loss to signal smorgasbord

The cost-of-living crisis has upended spending patterns and squeezed marketing budgets as consumers and brands alike scrutinise their own finances with consumers more likely to be shopping around for a better deal. It’s never been more important to have up-to-date intelligence on prospective audiences. Fail to stay on the pulse, and it’s easy for a competitor to swoop in and claim the ground you’ve ceded. 

Thankfully, this intelligence has never been easier to acquire. The supply side of the advertising world - publishers, ecommerce, retailers and the platforms that make their inventory and audiences accessible - has rapidly advanced the collection and activation of their audience data, leveraging their many direct touchpoints with consumers to provide valuable insights for brands and agencies.

With crude, approximate identifiers such as third-party cookies falling out of favour and email addresses butting against scale barriers, proximity to consumers has become everything. This shift reflects a growing desire from buyers for a more direct connection to their target audiences and streamlined paths within the supply chain. 

By aggregating publisher first-party data - from consented user logins to anonymised contextual and behavioural signals - and extending audiences across domains, the supply side is opening up a sprawling map of actionable consumer insights and pre-packaged audience segments. 

Instead of plugging their audience IDs and segments into the advertising ecosystem and hoping enough prospects bite, brands and agencies can now leverage direct consumer signals to buy inventory that indexes highly against their most valuable target audiences. Not only are vital clues to an audience’s mindset delivered more quickly, but they are also defined with a level of granularity that was never possible before. 

Let’s say a household was shopping around for a new energy provider. There is an array of signals this household leaves behind that could reveal what messaging would win them over. Frequent visits to price comparison sites would indicate a cost-conscious household whose tariff is coming to an end imminently, who may be disposed towards limited time offers and budget-tracking smart meters.

Another household might read content on eco-friendly lifestyles and watch vegan cooking videos, making them the ideal target for messaging focusing on an energy provider’s green credentials. This household wouldn’t only be targetable on media directly related to their eco interests either, as supply-side signals might reveal other media they engage with that advertisers might not think to look at, such as financial news or travel influencers. 

An energy provider (or their agency) would be able to optimise their campaign to each of these micro-audiences without ballooning their research costs or diluting brand messaging to reach the lowest common denominator. By seeing the full scope of their prospects’ media diet - rather than lumping them into single-interest buckets - they would also be able to place their messaging in locations their competitors might not even think to look.

Of course, this goes much further than just two households: by probabilistically extending known households that fall into these target segments across the full range of inventory available, the supply-side can make unknown households addressable as well, massively increasing reach with minimal sacrifice to precision.

Building bridges between buy side and sell-side

All these sell-side audience signals wouldn’t matter if the buy side couldn’t join forces with them, which is where data collaboration and identity come in.

Data collaboration platforms come in various guises, but broadly promise the same functionality: secure, private data sharing between two parties without either party’s data leaving the hands of the owner. If an agency and a publisher want to work on a branded content campaign, for example, they could overlay their respective audience databases to see where they share audiences and where there are opportunities for untapped reach.

Such technologies are steering the advertising ecosystem into a cooperative landscape where insights are opened up for mutually beneficial partnerships. A rising tide lifts all boats, and - with the economy how it is - we could all do with a bit of a lift right now.

Identity is a broader concept. On one end, it covers how brands, agencies and publishers bundle IDs together - such as email addresses, device IDs, IP addresses and so on - to assemble unified digital profiles. On the other hand, it refers to interoperability between the various alternative IDs that grew large during the cookie deprecation feeding frenzy.

The nitty-gritty of how this all works is mind-bendingly complex, but the result is simple: identity allows advertisers and publishers to confirm who their audiences are and where they spend their time. This allows advertisers to find incremental media opportunities instead of chasing the same people in the same channels; vital for breaking through in this period of media fragmentation, coupled with more considered, cost-conscious purchasing behaviours.  

The stubborn cost-of-living crisis means we can’t assume current customers will stick around, or that prospective customers can be drawn from the usual pool. Brands can overcome this challenge by leveraging the connected data ecosystem to work from the consumer backwards, weaving their habits, preferences and lifestyles into the fabric of a campaign right from the drawing board. The result is better outreach and outcomes with less guesswork and waste, bringing down costs and boosting performance.