Magic Numbers: Billy Loizou on Why Brands Need a First Party Data Strategy

Billy Loizou has over 15 years of experience in design, technology and marketing. He has worked with some of the world's most renowned and respected brands, helping them improve their customer experience and drive profitability. 

Joining Amperity in August this year, Billy leads sale and marketing efforts and is charged with building an expert team to help brands in APAC. Billy is also a board member at the CDP Institute ANZ, and previously, the Australian Loyalty Association. He has worked with brands such as ANZ Bank, Bakers Delight, Seek, Medibank, and Marina Bay Sands.

LBB> What’s the number one question that clients are coming to you with when it comes to how they can better use data to enhance the creativity of their content and experiences?

Billy> There really is no number one question, as that varies so much by brand. At Amperity, data-driven creativity means letting the robust and trustworthy dataset lead. In the travel space, that often means being able to identify multi-reservation or online travel agency (OTA) guests who haven’t joined the frequent guest programme and offering them similar offers that entice joining. In the casual and quick dining space where anonymous transactions are more common, the connection of online orders with in-store POS reveals accuracy about channel behaviours that can lead to very interesting messaging. The opportunities are really endless when the first party data is accessible and accurate.

LBB> How can you make sure that data is elevating creativity rather than forming a wind tunnel effect and knocking all the interesting or unique edges off that make something distinctive?

Billy> Size and impact reporting as part of an analytics workflow is very under-invested. When marketing, analytics and IT hold hands closely they will ensure tooling includes these metrics to give Marketing a “size of the prize” estimate before they activate campaigns.

LBB> Can you share with us any examples of projects you’ve worked on where the data really helped boost the creative output in a really exciting way?

Billy> It is always fun to uncover something about a customer that allows the next communication or experience to be truly personalised. That usually includes aspects of price sensitivity, channel or time of day preferences, and communication preferences. At one quick-serve restaurant, once we compiled online and offline data, we found a theme of customers who went through the drive thru in the morning and did online orders in the evening - an insight the brand couldn’t see before data was unified. That allowed them to build creative campaigns to drive morning pre-offers, use SMS for opt-in customers, and incentivise lunch or dinner orders with morning drive-thru customers, all with the appropriate level of discounting. 

LBB> More brands are working to create their own first party data practice. How can a brand figure out whether that’s something that is relevant or important for their business? 

Billy> Brands building up their first-party data practice are on the right track. For too long, brands have eschewed investment in their most valuable asset because they could get good enough using third-party cookies and siloed channel or programme-specific platforms. Investment in first-party data simply MUST result in an accurate and accessible unified customer profile that gives brands and agencies data sets that start to bubble up insights about the customer they couldn’t have imagined. 

LBB> We talk about data driving creativity, but what are your thoughts about approaching the use of data in a creative way?

Billy> One creative approach we see brands taking - especially those who have recognised the value in first-party data - is to infuse feedback loops and meaningful conversation with customers to build up their first-party data asset. This can be less overt such as offering opportunities to sign up for notifications such as back-in stock or price drops; it can be a beneficial tool giving sizing suggestions; or it can be very overt such as a quick survey. Customers expect that any data you give them will be used for their benefit so brands taking this path have to have a plan to turn the data into value.

LBB> "Lies, damned lies, and statistics." How can brands and creatives make sure that they’re really seeing what they think they’re seeing (or want to see) in the data, or that they’re not misusing data?

Billy> This really goes back to the confidence that the data is truly complete. Brands making decisions on ‘unified customer profiles’ with incomplete data probably aremaking poor assumptions. Examples of this might include not integrating both online and offline data or having poor identity resolution that cannot resolve across the multiple email addresses a customer has shared. In those cases, you’re making assumptions about preferred channels, price sensitivity, and overall brand engagement. The key to ensuring you’re not misusing data is to compile customer profiles from all of your customer interactions.

LBB> What are your thoughts about trust in data? To what extent is uncertainty and a lack of trust in data (or data sources) an issue and what are your thoughts on that?

Billy> Lack of trust in data is a huge issue. Even after decades of attempts to unify data (master data managers MDMs), manage customer communications (customer relationship managers CRMs and marketing clouds),and unify customer profiles (customer data platforms) brands are still left with this major issue. MDMs are not accessible to marketers. CRMs and Marketing Clouds don’t overlay data sources with a comprehensive approach to identity resolution. And CDP has become a very hot acronym that now means everything from web personalisation tag manager to customer experience platform - completely dropping focus on the ‘data’ piece of the name. It is crucial for brands to build a unified customer profile and to ensure there is full transparency and accessibility into those profiles for all the teams along the value chain.

LBB> With so many different regulatory systems in different markets regarding data and privacy around the world - as well as different cultural views about privacy - what’s the key to creating a joined-up data strategy at a global level that’s also adaptable to local nuances?

Billy> Managing customer data across disparate sources is a nearly impossible approach to meeting privacy requirements. Brands need to be thinking about how they centralise their view of the customer and govern that data from as few locations as possible.

LBB> What does a responsible data practice look like?

Billy> Responsible data practices mean not only complying with the laws in each country, but also thinking ahead to ensure that as data innovation evolves, ethical data practices evolve, too. Brands need a managed strategy for customer data that ensures accuracy, compliance, governance, access and control. It requires brands to bring the data together, not for their own benefit, but for the benefit of the customer. However, they need to do it in a way that is designed for security.

LBB> In your view, what’s the biggest misconception people have around the use of data in marketing?

Billy> A common misconception is that a brand's data is too difficult to clean up. The truth is, customer data will always be messy. Customer data comes in from different sources, in different formats, volumes and at different speeds. It’s constantly evolving as people move through life. 

The idea that it can be ‘cleaned up’ is a costly distraction. The act of constantly trying to ‘clean’ their data takes the focus off the things that truly matter – teamwork, productivity, employee satisfaction, customer service and the bottom line to name a few.

So, instead of trying to ‘clean’ the data, organisations need the right technology. They need technology that takes a flexible approach to gathering and matching data and can account for its ever-changing nature – allowing organisations to (finally) put their data to work.

LBB> In terms of live issues in the field, what are the debates or developments that we should be paying attention to right now?

Billy> Third-party cookies haven’t gone away yet but the impact has already started. Brands are seeing a huge degradation in match rates as consumers continue to ask not to be tracked. Brands who are starting to activate first-party cookies through on-boarders face an unacceptable data lag - sometimes a week or more waiting for first-party cookies to be converted into another ID and then activated. 

The result is:1) small(er) audiences, and 2) less impactful ads. 

These two trends are not sustainable, especially when economic conditions require higher productivity than ever. Therefore, the short answer to the degradation of third-party cookies is to directly activate first-party data with advertisers. Even if your first-party data seems like a mess, bypassing third-party ecosystems and the low match rates there will improve audience sizes by huge multiples.

The longer term answer is for brands to tackle their first-party data into accurate and robust unified customer profiles. Layering more accurate customer profiles on top of the direct to advertiser can result in 10-30x better audience sizes and eliminate week long lags in data processing at the on-boarder or data management platform (DMP).