Jason Downie

Jason Downie

US CEO
Related topics: Google partner

RampUp 2024 Insights & Reflections by US CEO, Jason Downie

US CEO, Jason Downie attended RampUp 2024 and writes about his key insights and reflections from the event.

 

“At Rampup 2024, the term “data collaboration” was said MORE times than AI. That is a first! Scott Howe’s keynote focused on the dawn of this new era, ushered in by changes in user expectations for privacy and personalization, changes in regulations, and the deprecation of 3P party cookies.  

A month prior, I heard David Cohen speak at IAB ALM, and he called the upcoming years “The In-Between Years”. The messy middle between what was the standard for the last 30 years (3P cookies and precision marketing) and what will be for the next +30 years (1P data, AI-powered modeling, and collaboration).

A few weeks before IAB ALM, I heard Google’s Steve Yap speak at a US GMP Sales Partner summit. He spoke to the future of Google’s ad and martech being a “cooperative”.

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Marketers need to figure out what their new “partner ecosystem” will look like and move quickly to build those relationships and the interconnectedness needed to achieve their goals.

In order to fully participate, marketers need:

  • 1PD collected, prepped, de-siloed and organized
  • Data Housed in a place (a cloud, or multiple clouds) where it can be made available for use across multiple partners (in a privacy-safe, secure environment)
  • Clean room tech that unlocks data collaboration across brands, data partners, and retailers in a way that also protects consumer privacy and consent
  • Platform partners that enable interoperable activation of the data where customers live (e.g. through PAIR into Google DV360)
  • A way to pull the results back down to the data warehouse for analysis and measurement

To do all this, marketers will need multiple partners.  Consulting firms, system integrators, cloud providers, clean room tech, data partners, etc..  We are trying to figure out, as an industry, how to do business for the next 30 years.

Marketers are generally not set up to do this.  They sell soft drinks.  Or soap.  Or checking accounts.  Some in-housing (or as we like to say, “right-housing”) is needed to own the data.  Testing and learning can be expensive.  But it needs to be done.  Marketers should be trying lots of different tactics in a short period of time (fail small and fast to win big!) in these in-between years, in order to arrive at more permanent solutions that will work for the new era.

Finding trusted advisors to help make sense of all the partners feels like an important step in this process.  Lots of companies have point solutions, or ad inventory, or data assets, or do media planning, buying, or measurement.  But a lot less are client-centric experts in the data collaboration value chain of the future.  Consulting plus hands-on-keyboard thingdoers to evaluate tech, collect, move, organize and activate 1PD, and enables tech connections and run POCs.  There will be an evolution towards companies becoming “ad tech system integrators for the CMO” or Data AORs as data collection and collaboration become more important.  And marketers will be better off as this evolution continues, so they can tie all this together in bespoke winning strategies.”

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