What’s changed — and the reason why almost two-thirds (62 percent) of brands have made uncovering data arbitrage and the markups made on their data a priority in 2018 — is that advertisers are tightening up their contracts.
If an advertiser doesn’t have contracts in place that guarantee transparency, it won’t know the fee added on to data segments as they are passed down the chain.
Pernod Ricard is pursuing what Conor McQuaid, evp of global business development at Pernod Ricard calls a “test and learn” approach to weeding out the unreliable third-party data it is buying from data vendors.
One way to do this is by comparing third-party data with Pernod Ricard’s own data.
For instance, a third-party data set of a company’s current subscribers can be shown to be unreliable if its first-party data shows those same people clicked on an ad and signed up to become new subscribers. “We’re buying the appropriate data and then seeing what the response is from the activity to determine whether it’s valid,” explained McQuaid. “Clearly, our preference is to use our own data where possible.”
According to Infectious Media, which has extensively tested third-party data on behalf of its clients, it’s often difficult to get complete transparency on the third-party data supply chain:
“Where we can’t get the transparency we require, we generally find it better to source data directly from publishers to ensure provenance and quality and to eliminate hidden charges in the supply chain,” said Dan Larden, Infectious Media’s global strategic partnerships director.
Rather than rely on agencies to help detect those hidden fees as some advertisers are, Pernod Ricard has turned to its in-house team of experts. The advertiser “still has some way to go” on bolstering its own data analytics expertise, McQuaid admitted, but it's making progress.