External data collaborations were once thought of as nice to have or strictly the purview of companies with limited first-party data and deep analytics resources. However, less access to data has prompted all types of companies to kick-start data partnership conversations and reevaluate their core marketing infrastructure.
If you’re looking to advance your data strategy and build a true 360-degree view of your consumers, you’re probably breaking down internal data silos, coming up with a list of companies you’d like to partner with, and getting smart on how you can work together while protecting consumer privacy.
How can data collaboration help me?
It’s easy to see why a CPG would want to enter into a data partnership with the retailers it sells through. To broaden thinking on data collaboration across industries, it’s helpful to categorize potential partners by what you mutually want to achieve:
- Innovative collaboration: This is a partnership between companies that may not have obvious audience overlap and affinities, but that’s what makes them attractive. Partnering offers a chance to unlock new insights about your consumers that you’d otherwise never discover.
For example, if you’re an automotive brand, you might want to partner with a big box retailer to uncover shopping insights that will help you curate new messaging.
- Transactional collaboration: This restricted type of collaboration can help fill in blind spots in the customer journey. From a data science perspective, this type of collaboration usually involves analysis of fixed predefined queries over fixed taxonomies. While the potential for uncovering new insights may be low, the value of the aggregated responses may still provide insights to improve customer experiences.
One example that is particularly timely now is restaurant groups and QSRs partnering with delivery companies to spot macrotrends to plan for as the coronavirus pandemic continues. - Extensive partnership collaboration: This is a highly trusted collaboration among equals with a strong business case for working together. Retailers and CPG companies, as an example, may enter into partnership collaborations to boost customer intelligence, reveal product affinities, and optimize a shared go-to-market strategy.
Build privacy-first data partnerships with LiveRamp
Once you have a list of companies you’d like to approach for partnership, the next step is connecting with their marketing, analytics, and data teams to discuss how you might collaborate with your data assets. Be prepared to answer questions such as what do you want to use the data for? How do you manage customer preferences? How do you handle opt-outs? How is the data stored? Most importantly, what collaboration tools will you use that protect customer and business privacy while maximizing the potential to reveal significant insights?
These are questions we are often called upon to answer by our customers as we know their data and privacy strategies well and are trusted to power them with LiveRamp. Understanding that every type of data collaboration has unique privacy controls, we work with companies to build trust by ensuring that data remains under the control of the data owner.
LiveRamp in action
One of our leading retail clients uses LiveRamp to strengthen collaboration with media partners. This company planned and reviewed the types of data collaborations worth pursuing, whether they are opportunities to advertise with the retailer, provide insights to specific product sales or trends, or even to help teams understand a shared common audience. Each of these use cases can drive more impact across lines of business built around accurately capturing those customer insights. Partnership selection, approval criteria, and data tooling are chosen based on what works best for each scenario.
Something important to note is that data collaboration is only possible with alignment across partners from a privacy and security perspective. For each company the primary data owner wants to bring into its LiveRamp environment, we work with that company’s privacy, data, and infosec departments, as well as their and marketing teams, prior to implementation. We ensure that the technology framework we build for them to collaborate gives all parties the control they need over their data.
Modular privacy controls
As LiveRamp is completely modular and tailorable to countless use cases, companies can choose the level of privacy preservation they need to ensure compliance while still enabling teams to work together and uncover new opportunities. By fostering this level of transparency, communication, and collaboration, we ensure that partnerships start off on the right foot. Analyzing customer data to optimize media spend is just the tip of the iceberg. LiveRamp enables your data and analytics team to uncover revenue-driving insights, helping you achieve market advantage