TV Rev: What Really is First-Party Data

The following excerpt is from CEO & Co-Founder, Field Garthwaite's column in TV Rev's Thought Leader Circle.

Is a narrow definition of first-party data limiting its potential?

If you asked ten ad tech veterans what constitutes first-party data, you’d likely get ten responses that all map back to identity. From email addresses to demography, the industry’s view on what defines first-party data tends to focus exclusively on audience data. But are we missing part of the point? What about context and all of the data associated with it? Shouldn't we be paying attention to that too?

Another flavor of first-party data

At its most basic, first-party data is defined as any data a company owns. Even if the definition is broadened to data that is owned and collected directly from customers, the content a person watches on your platform or the content that is consumed is a part of that dataset. Taking that one step further, real-time, contextual metadata translates to insights that can also be another powerful signal of interest and intent for a viewer.

A modern and insightful dataset

Contextual data has come a long way since the early days of analyzing page-level text to discern context for targeting and other purposes. Search and display were the first advertising categories to benefit from technological advances that provided more insight and more specifics regarding the contextual environment. These were primarily used by marketers to avoid unsafe content and generally align with relevant pages or article environments...

Read Field's full column in TV Rev.