Ex-Googler Reveals How to ACTUALLY Work With First-Party Data

Episode Description2024 is the year when the cookie finally crumbles.

Google says by the end of the year, it expects to fully remove third-party cookies for all of its Chrome users.

Of course, the real advertisers know that the solution to all this is to invest in your own first-party data.

And that’s what I discussed with Ronan Carrein in this episode of PPC Town Hall.

Ronan is a former Googler who worked in the product strategy, sales operations, and data solutions teams. Right now, he’s the COO at Better & Stronger, a digital marketing agency based in Lyon, France.

Tune into this episode to learn:

- Why most marketers misunderstand first-party data

- Why actively collecting first-party data is great for your business

- How to improve your ad performance using first-party data

- How to maintain data hygiene and

- What’s the future of data privacy regulation in the U.S.

Episode Takeaways

1. Misunderstanding of First-Party Data:
   • Marketers often struggle to understand first-party data, partially due to complex and rapidly changing regulations. This misunderstanding can lead to underutilization in marketing strategies.
2. Benefits of Actively Collecting First-Party Data:
   • Viewing first-party data as an asset rather than a burden can significantly improve business hygiene and ROI. It enhances customer relationships through direct and transparent interactions.
3. Improving Ad Performance Using First-Party Data:
   • Leveraging first-party data for targeted advertising enhances the effectiveness of campaigns, leading to improved customer behavior predictions and higher ROAS.
4. Maintaining Data Hygiene:
   • Effective data hygiene involves understanding data sources, ensuring consistent data definitions, and establishing clear governance, which supports compliance and informed decision-making.
5. Future of Data Privacy Regulation in the U.S.:
   • Expectations point towards stricter privacy regulations, emphasizing consensual data use and enhancing transparency in data practices.

Additional Takeaways:

• Transitioning to a data-centric business model should be incremental, starting with basic data management and gradually advancing to more sophisticated analyses.
• Keeping up with data privacy changes requires businesses to be proactive and adaptable in their data handling and compliance efforts.

Episode Transcript

RONAN CARREIN: The entire industry got insanely lazy in the last 20 years. You had platforms selling you advertising and the reporting to report on their own performance based on something cookies, which is fundamentally incredibly weak from a reporting standpoint. So people forgot how to do what insurance companies did in the 80s, which is segmenting their data and like building propensity model of who’s likely to cause an accident more than another and so on.

So I think there’s a fundamental thing that is, is good about this is, Just forcing people into better business hygiene. I don’t think I think in 20 years people will move back and say oh my god Our business improved so much not because of the targeting thing, but just because we started auditing our business properly.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Okay.

So, Ronan Carrein, welcome to PPC Town Hall. Thank you very much We got a big topic here today and uh, we got a European on the call. So, uh, who better to talk about First party data and privacy regulations than the European, but, uh, your company better, stronger has been moving into the United States as well.

And I think what we’re going to talk about today is really about sort of, um, how first party data in Europe, it’s a necessity because of privacy regulations in the United States and Canada and other places, it’s not quite at that point yet, but there’s a lot of business benefit to it, right? So that’s why we wanted to talk about first party data.

RONAN CARREIN: Yeah, that’s the central idea is a first party data and having a first party data strategy should not be perceived as a constraint. It’s, it’s primarily a, a driver of a better business hygiene and greater return on investment. So definitely the opportunity probably getting much bigger than the constraint.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Okay, great. Well, but before we talk about the topic at hand, tell people a little bit about who you are and your background, and I believe you were ex Google. Currently in, uh, hanging out in Switzerland.

RONAN CARREIN: Absolutely. So, um, I did the most of my career at Google for roughly 15 years, uh, did a lot of work on advertising products and commercialization of advertising products.

Um, I’ve been working on the publisher side as well, so I’d say I know the, uh, the data issues and opportunities on both sides of the coin. Um, in my last few years at Google, I was mostly working on first party data monetization and making sense of the, the legal environment. So, uh, this is really sort of like the, the core of my expertise is how to.

Leverage your data to turn it into, as I said, better business hygiene and new revenue streams or improve revenue streams. And in the last few years, um, I became one of the two partners in this company, Better and Stronger. Um, and primarily my goal was to rebuild the entire service offering around the idea that data should be at the very center of your digital strategy.

So absolutely my core area of expertise.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Good. Well, hey, let’s talk about first party data now and again, in Europe, it’s sort of that necessity, right? Because of privacy regulations, but talk maybe a little bit about what you see in differences now that you’re entering the American market a little bit as well.

Like, what’s people’s perception of first party data and the need for it?

RONAN CARREIN: So I’d say there’s two dominant ideas that I see. Uh, the first one is if you ask somebody. To define what is first party data and how it has an impact on their business. The portion of people that can give you an accurate answer is extremely limited.

So the object is already poorly understood. Um, the second thing that we see is, um, people tend to freeze in front of the challenge because they misunderstand the regulation, which is a challenge because as you start to make sense of it, it changes. Um, so the change is really fast and it’s not really applied.

In a uniform manner across the different countries. So people tend to say, I don’t understand the topic. Uh, I don’t understand the object. And the regulation seems to be quite a mess. The risk of acting seems to be pretty high in terms of cost. So very often what they do is they freeze and do, uh, Literally nothing.

Sometimes they ask to their legal counsel for advice and the legal counsel tends to just say no to everything, uh, for a very simple reason, which is if you ask for a building permit for a house that has no plan, you won’t get your permit. Um, and this is something that we see a lot, um, that sort of generate paralysis because people don’t know what to do with it.

Therefore, they don’t know how to work with their legal counsel to, uh, enable. Or put together a legal plan that will enable taking action with first party data. And therefore, uh, people just don’t do much aside from very large company. We can afford, you know, the top like, uh, uh, low firms.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah. And that’s interesting because I mean, at the core of first party data is the data that people have given you as part of doing business.

So having the legal, uh, permission. That’s foundational, right? Like everyone should have that. And most websites you encounter today, I mean, they ask for the cookie permission. And so that’s really what we’re talking about. Once you’ve got that permission and you have that first party data. But then when we talk about first party data, do people even misunderstand?

What is first party data?

RONAN CARREIN: Yeah. So I would say, I think we need to look at data in terms of the origin and the nature of it. Uh, first party data is data that originated from an interaction that you have had directly with a user, uh, ideally willingly and in a transparent manner. So it can be, um, uh, a first party cookie, meaning a cookie that you drop It could be the result of an interaction you’ve had in a store.

Uh, you could be using a cookie based in nature, but it could be something very different. Um, it could be the result of an interaction you’ve had in a store. Um, it could be the result of a previous transaction. Um, you know, um, I like to give that example quite often as to something that can become first party data that’s not even perceived as such.

But let’s say you go to a CVS or something equivalent and you buy a product, you don’t necessarily want everybody to know that you bought that product. Let’s say, um, I’m going to say hemorrhoid cream, for example. If you just purchased it, you pay in cash, it goes into a system and says, We sold one cube of hemorrhoid cream and it’s not first part.

It’s not user data, first party data to the company, but it’s not user data. If you pay and you use your CVS card, I assume there’s something like this. And to get the points or whatever it, that transaction becomes linked to you and that becomes first party data. And it can be something that happens offline.

So I would say in nature, data can be cookie based or non cookie based. And first party means it’s the direct result of an interaction between you and the user in a, in a, in a willing manner, not that they read every terms and condition to everything, but they have access to the information to design.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Interesting. Um, yeah, and then there’s some recent news that I believe it’s Cox media has been using microphones. In devices to listen to people, and then they use that for advertising and targeting. So, in a way, you can think of that as first party data as well, but that’s where it then crosses the line, obviously, because they haven’t necessarily received the right permissions to deploy that data for advertising, or people would even be very shocked to know that, oh, my God, they, they’ve been listening to me.

And so it’s not just the fact that ads come from it, but it’s like that, that’s not right. Um, right. Even though it’s first party data.

RONAN CARREIN: Yeah. Well, I mean, actually you can push that reasoning even further. If you really think of first party data, once you’re convinced that this is highly valuable and you can leverage that to better run your business through providing a better experience to your users.

Uh, once you’ve accepted that, that baseline, that hypothesis, which is correct. Uh, it should be seen as an enormous opportunity to find ways to interact with your users in a way that you provide them value in exchange for them sharing a little bit of data. And if you start thinking like this, and if you start thinking that the experience around your product or service may go beyond the transaction.

Give you an example. You sell running shoes. The experience of your product happens when you run, when you speak of your run on, let’s say, Facebook or Strava. It happens when you, you know, choose your product, when you decide to go on a competition with some friends. This is that many areas are like, like parts of the, of the product experience where you can be present and add some value and collect some valuable information.

So. It should really be seen as a, as a new mindset. It’s, it’s really, uh, you know, don’t try to treat people into giving you first party data. Try to use the collective first party data as an excuse to develop really meaningful brand interaction.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah, that’s a good point because ultimately when it comes to running shoes, you can go to Adidas, Nike, Under Armour, Brooks and on and on.

And so the question becomes who has provided me the best experience? Who seems to know that maybe you’re a long distance runner or You like trial running, right? And who gives you an experience that enhances that? Well, um, it’s a very interesting. And then do you feel like in Europe and the United States, is there a difference in terms of how much the consumer is willing to change their information for a better experience?

RONAN CARREIN: Um, you know, there’s, there’s an old study. I believe it was actually, uh, funded by Google, but I’m not sure about this, but the story, the study for, for real is, is the stories for sure is for real. Uh, they were asking people about. What they’re afraid of when it comes to privacy and data. And, uh, it turned out that they didn’t really care that companies knew about all that kind of stuff where they were really afraid of.

And if you go deep and you say, what is your primal fear between data being collected? They were afraid that their relatives and colleagues and either knowing about something shameful, shameful about themselves. Which had very little to do with commercial transactions. So, um, I believe this is across all the, all humans on this planet.

Um, no matter what the, the country. So, you know, in that regard, like a lot of the fears around data usage are fairly rational. And it’s the same probably in U. S. and in the Europe. Uh, and in Europe, I, I tend to ask people in, You know, more like social setup, like, uh, uh, would you pay Google 20 or 30 bucks a month to get maps and all the services that come with it?

Um, and I think if you put it this way, people are like, well, actually, no, I, I would not. So in terms of user habits, I would say the fears, they tend to come and go with the latest. Sort of like a trend and then what’s being communicated in the media. They are mostly, mostly based on an extremely poor understanding of the reality of what’s happening with their data.

And that’s, that’s really a shame to some extent, but it’s, I get it. It’s complicated to understand what happens, you know, like most people in the tech industry. I mean, not engineers and everything, but in the digital marketing industry, I have a hard time explaining the difference between a first and a third party cookie.

So, um, it’s not too surprising. So back to your question between Europe and. In the US, I would say, I don’t see, surprisingly, I don’t see a much better use of first party data coming from American companies, despite them being less reliable. afraid or just not caring about regulation at all. I think, uh, there’s, there’s bigger roadblocks than that for fully adopting first party data and like turning it into a powerhouse for your companies.

And those major roadblocks are quite simply the lack of data governance, the lack of intent, just people not knowing what they could do with it. Um, um, and, and therefore not putting together a plan. Um, I think this is the primary reason and the second thing is also, there’s a certain skill set that you need to have, which is, uh, you don’t only need to have a data scientist, you need to have a data scientist that understands business to some extent, business auditing and digital marketing as well.

So I don’t see a much bigger adoption coming from US companies. I would say I see a much bigger adoption coming from very large companies. That’s a very different thing, whether they’re in Europe or whether in the US, um, I’ve seen in Europe, large retailing companies. conglomerates who build a unique user ID across all the brands, build very fancy things.

Um, and, uh, and probably being a bit more careful from a legal standpoint, but they go for it either way because, you know, they have the right counsel for that. They work with like large law firms and they show them what to do.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: And so you mentioned a couple of the roadblocks, right? So one is the legal. Um, it is having a plan of what is the house you want to build and what is it you want to do with this first party data.

And then you talked about having the data scientists or the analysts on the team to help you get there. So when it comes to these three roadblocks, like, do you see a typical order in which a company is going to address this and is there a way for the smaller one to do this as well, or do you think it is just so complicated that only the big ones can do it?

RONAN CARREIN: That’s a very good question. Actually, there is a path. Uh, that makes things like incredibly simpler. Look, it’s the same as if, uh, you see a great cook in the kitchen and you’re like, Oh my God, like I can never do that. And then he publishes the book and you open the book and it’s going to take you twice or three times the same amount of time and your onions won’t be cut the same way, but the dish is surprisingly going to taste the same.

And that’s just the same, same idea applies here from the legal standpoint. So I want to just start with a little bit of a caveat or metaphor. I’m done with metaphors. Um, If you talk about digital marketing and you say you got to pump your SEO game or your remarketing game, it’s like saying you go to the gym and you got to do more squats or more bench.

But if you say you need to start having a proper first party data strategy, the question is a lot closer to you need to change your life hygiene. It’s not about going to the gym and pushing one thing or lifting on one machine. So it’s a, it’s a much more like broader topic to embrace. So that, that’s the first thing you need to start with that mindset.

Um, if you start with that mindset, you can take all the main, like, uh, let’s say stakeholders in your company and say, what is the data that we’re producing? And what should we be able to make of that data when it comes to targeting or reporting on the efficiency of our business or the KPIs that we care for?

Once you, once you have those questions, um, you know, those questions that you probably all ask yourself, like, if I had an extra dollar, how should I hun you, how should I spend it to get maximum re margin or return on investment? Uh, can I really tell the contribution of my social media effort over my overall digital marketing or, you know, uh, uh, who are the subsegments of users that bring me the most value in the long term?

Like everybody has those questions. But very few people actually have the answer and it probably lays in your first party data. So once you have that, you lay those down and you start building a plan as to how you plan to use it. Then you can, in that order, you lay down the plan, your intent. This is what I would like to do.

This is the data that I have today and where it lives. Then you pause on the, pause on the intent for a second, right?

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: So you made the great analogy to go into the gym. Um, but why do people go to the gym? Right? They want to get skinnier. They want to get buffered. They want to be healthier. What are those reasons?

Because I don’t think anyone goes into like, Hey, I’m going to start doing first party data, right? Like it’s about real life. It’s actually scary as hell.

RONAN CARREIN: Nobody wants to touch it.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: So the reason why, why would you touch it? Like, what, what do you see when you talk to your clients? Like what’s the overarching primary reason why people say like, Hey, let’s go and do..

RONAN CARREIN: the starting points are always a very specific issue usually due to the lack of trust in data, example, uh, I want to go through another round of funding and I’m completely incapable of showing to my VC what is the CAC to LTV ratio? Because if I ask five different people in my company, you got five different answers. Uh, and it starts from a question like this, or it goes such as we spent 25 percent of the management team in building manual reports because it’s so all over the place that we completely lost control about the data truth in our company.

Or it is something like, um, You know, we’re fully aware that we need to start segmenting our users and it’s just, we don’t even know where to start.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Interesting. So it almost comes from this really high level, like data hygiene reporting. Does it ever come from the angle of, um, sorry, it’s, it’s giving me thumbs up, like, I don’t know why.

Um, but, um, But, but, but does it ever come from a place of I’m frustrated with my ROAS and I see no other way to improve the ROAS?

RONAN CARREIN: That’s a very good question. The frustration with the ROAS is there, but the connection with first party data is almost never there. So people will say I’m frustrated with my ROAS, but if you tell them, you know, if you leverage your first party data in such and such way, you can get like double digit improvement in your ROAS and it’s like, It hardly ever fails.

Like, especially if you do hardly anything with your first party data, then people get very first skeptical, uh, and then, and then they really get engaged. Uh, so the starting point is often reporting and it becomes the incremental investment often comes from the greater ROAS.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Right. And that’s interesting.

And you sit in these meetings, right. With clients and everybody’s frustrated with ROAS. I mean, even if you’re happy or like, I wish it was better.

RONAN CARREIN: I’ve never, I’ve never had a client ever that said, yeah, that’s perfectly good. Thank you very much. Can I pay you more?

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: No, never happened. Exactly. So, and then you say there’s the disconnect.

So is it that people say, Oh, can I do something simpler? Can I just, um, have landing page optimization, CRO optimization, attext optimization, like do they see these as the levers that are more effective and, and. Or do they literally not make the connection to, if I had first party data and I did something with audiences and I did something more sophisticated, I’d get great results as well.

RONAN CARREIN: So they will tend to lean towards the topics that they know most of that they’ve experienced in the past. So if somebody has had results with SEO or CRO in the past, they’ll say, you know, I want somebody to help with my CRO, my mail automation, you name it, anything. There’s very, very few people today that say.

I’ve built a sophisticated first party data infrastructure to improve my performance in the past. And therefore this is what I want. So to your point on like one of the questions people ask typically is, or they don’t ask it in such a way, but we try to answer that question for them is to say, your next move should be the lowest hanging fruit in terms of what can improve your return on ad investment really quick so that you start like trusting us and get to the next move.

When you’re going to keep on like repeating that look. And first party data is typically very scary because people associate it to a project like a new CRM or a new website. They think it’s going to take two years. They think it’s going to be overdue. They think the price is going to get multiplied.

They think they’re going to end up in a lawsuit with you. Which literally never happens if you do it well. Like, it literally never happens because technically, technologically speaking it’s not that complicated. It’s more of a service thing. So, for all those reasons people tend to stay away from it And whenever you say it, it’s the same as I feel like it’s the same as that guy who goes to the doctor and this guy tells him like, I told you the last 20 years about losing weight.

He said, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I know. I know. Like not now. I got too much work. You know, the second kid, it’s treated a little bit like that.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: It’s small steps to start getting you there. Right. So I think this is really cool, Ronan. I mean, basically what you’re laying out there is the secret almost, because most people don’t seem to make that connection between first party data and better ad performance.

And you’re telling us that, yes, it is a scary project, but it doesn’t have to be as scary or as difficult as people sometimes believe it is.

RONAN CARREIN: There’s a couple of things, by the way, on that specific point that are really important. It doesn’t need to be built from the, like, from A to Z, to, you know, There’s no such thing as completion, but you don’t, you don’t have such thing as a finished product.

You, you build the capability and then you leverage it little by little and you can add some increments. It’s a very scientific kind of methodology playing with data. You make an hypothesis, you test it, you prove that it’s making more money. You implemented that scale so you can start small and have short term results and then iterate It’s not like launching on your website where there’s the one day where you press the green button and hope that it doesn’t crash There’s nothing like this So in that regard, yes, absolutely

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: So take us a little bit through maybe one example, so if you said an improvement of return on ad spend is my And goal, and I’m going to use first party data to achieve that.

Um, what are some tactical examples that you could share?

RONAN CARREIN: So my first two steps would always be the same one. The first one is extremely short term, extremely easy. It is, let’s make sure that you collect all the first party, sort of like transactional DRM type of information, like the biggest possible consented user list that you have about who your clients are.

And even if you do it the first week and you do zero segmentation whatsoever, if you’ve not done so, you bulk ingest that entire thing in your targeting platforms. Uh, if you haven’t heard that like 6 million times already, whether it’s like Perfmax, Google, Facebook, et cetera, this is all becoming like extremely algorithmic.

Um, and the first thing you got to do is say, look, those are my clients and those are not my clients by, you know, by definition, just inverse. Uh, so, and just like, just do that. If you don’t have that in place.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: So take your existing client list and ingest it into the ad platform. So they can at least distinguish between new and existing.

RONAN CARREIN: Let’s give them the idea of like, look, you want to do some, some acquisition, exclude those guys, but also look for people that look like them. That’s, that’s just a super basic principle. Just start by doing this. You will already improve your performance versus somebody who’s not doing that. Then the second step is essentially to do the exact same thing.

But you start splitting people into segments so you can do it in many, many different ways. But the way I like to look at it is it depends on your business. You may sell the same type of product, but you have segments in terms of value. So let’s say, um, you know. You know, you’re a monoproduct, monoservice business, but some people consume a lot more of it than some others.

Then segment them in terms of like tiers, the top 35 percent of people who are highest value, put them same logic in another campaign and say, look, I want to bid more on people who look like that. And then you make the middle tier and the lowest tier, or you don’t target the lowest tier. If you sell a lot of different products..

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: So let me pause that for a second.

So when you look at your top, say 35 percent of customers, you have a recommendation on the timeframe to look at, does recency help with the algorithms or can you look pretty far back?

RONAN CARREIN: Uh, obviously it depends on the life cycle of the product as well. Like there’s some product categories where, you know, you don’t sell a car, be two weeks to someone.

So the data is going to be so old that the algorithms, you know, in the seven year life cycle, it’s not going to really do anything. Uh, you can find proxy ways to fix that. Sometimes when you don’t have enough historical data or the life cycles are too long, what we do is we look at the on site behavior of the last few weeks and we have a propensity model to say, look, there’s a 90 percent chance that guy is probably going to buy versus not that guy.

So we treat him as a, as not as a buyer, but an almost buyer. Uh, and so you can always find a way. to play with that. Obviously, um, uh, you know, like if you’re in a business with like very short life cycle, like food deliveries or apparel, especially cheaper stuff, it helps. Like it’s not the same for everything.

If you get into the business of selling houses or redoing bathrooms or stuff like that, it’s much more of like, uh, it’s using data for lead generation. It’s not like, It’s extremely valuable, but it’s slightly different use cases. I’m right now probably answering your question about like, what I would do with first party data in the concept of a direct to consumer type of interaction.

We can do lead gen after if you want. But, um, uh, yes, definitely it plays a role.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: And how do you, okay. So, so that’s helpful, right? So if your sales cycles are too long, do some regression models or predictive analysis to say these users seem like they’re on the path to converting. How do you address that back?

I mean, do you like to do daily bulk files? Do you do something a little bit more real time? And you don’t know what you want to do with it.

RONAN CARREIN: We have a client, for example, where they sell something where the recurrence is not so high and the price is fairly high. So what we want to do is we want to have the predictive model.

And look at all the people that, according to the model, should have bought but didn’t buy. And it’s pretty accurate, but then it gives you a short list of people that you can email because you know that the likelihood that they were that close to actually buy, like, is very high. So you can just go and, like, sort of, like, finish them off with an email or a direct call because it’s just, you know, high price tag and low volumes.

Um, in some other cases, what you want to be able to say is just say, Hey, look. Uh, you know, you want to, you want to artificially boost the conversion value on a certain user list or something because you think this user list has, um, you know, a way to look at this and say, you look at your CRM data by two years and you say, lifetime value, you take it from your CRM data, you take the top 20 percent people who have the highest lifetime value over the past two years.

And then you’re just going to say, Those people, if they convert, the value of that conversion is weighted by what you believe their lifetime value is. So it’s just going to be like in the, in the, uh, in the, uh, in the, uh, the campaign setup, you’re just going to change that. So there’s multiple ways you can use a propensity model.

Uh, you can also use people or, you know, for churn great use case.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah, no, and that makes sense. So basically, then you’re saying, okay, listen, these were my most valuable customers. So I put a higher conversion value for them. And that was the automated bidding systems from Google or Meta that those are higher value.

RONAN CARREIN: Without saying this, by the way, it would be giving poor advice if I was to limit it to the algorithmic idea. So, uh, one thing you can do if you’ve identified, let’s, let’s stick to those top 20 percent guys in our hypothetical, uh, uh, advertiser, you have those top 20 percent guy where you can do looking at your first party data is look at, or does the value find, but what did they buy?

Who are they? What are the product lines that they buy the most? What did they buy first? Have they been exposed to my social media campaigns or not? Have they been exposed to my email campaigns or not? Can I manufacture a high value person? And if I decide to target them based on all those information that I’ve had, I can also decide of the assets that I’m going to push, of the format that I’m going to push, of the networks that I’m, the channels that I’m going to push.

So it goes far beyond that. You can literally realize that your top 20 percent of users are, let’s say, liking your product line number one. And that they seem to increase their red shopping cart when they get exposed to social media content about that product line So you can inform your social media team because you’re retargeting Uh, also a lot of those people you can create group tests and make hypothesis if I expose them to this or if I don’t Expose them to this.

How am I impacting their lifetime value? So The idea is actually, uh, that’s resting a little bit, but there’s something really central about this is, of course, you improve the targeting by informing algorithms and giving them like different values for different user categories. But the main thing you do if you start thinking about targeting from first party data is.

Your audience segment becomes the object of your work, not the channel. And that’s really critical. Um, because let’s assume that you want to retarget a bunch of people and say, they are high value over long term, but I want, I would like them to buy one extra time every year, or maybe spend 20 percent more every time.

So you have multiple ways you can do that. You can, uh, push the collections on social media. You can send them mail automation. Uh, you can do remarketing. Uh, you know, you can do a lot of different things. Uh, you can send them just even paper, like mail, coupons, anything you want. But if you work with first party data, you can answer the following question, which to me is really critical is, what is the contribution of each of those channels to increasing the value of that user segment?

You could perfectly, let’s say you have three channels. You can literally split your segment into three and have three different distribution of budgets. And then, then it becomes basic high school math as to, you know, what’s the contribution of that channel over the other one. Um, and this is really phenomenal because if you take a, uh,targeting taken from a cookie list, So cookie list, Google has their own cookie list.

Facebook has their own cookie list. There’s a real problem, which is what we call the identity landscape. Meaning this is Google’s cookie list. It’s not Facebook cookie list and they don’t talk to one another. So you can never work around like the audience segment. You may have overlap, it’s super messy and it tells you nothing from a business standpoint.

But if you say the cookie, it’s not a cookie list. I gave the list to all of you and it’s the same list. Then the amount of. Of hypothesis that you can test and the, the media mix optimization and the, the asset mix optimization that you can do goes far beyond the, the, the impact you can have with simply like helping the algorithms and that’s, that’s really critical.

This is why I made the comparison earlier. It’s not like. Or work that muscle a little more. No, it’s a life hygiene type of thing. You change the way you approach how you target people the minute that you start seeing the power of first party data.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah, that’s awesome. And that’s where you’ve gotten into hygiene now, right?

So it is an amazing benefit to be able to do cross platform marketing and make sure there’s consistency and that you avoid overlap. from those engines. Now you also alluded to a number of really interesting business questions that you start asking. So how do you set up that? How do you maintain hygiene?

What kind of tools would you have as a business person? It’s easy for you to go and ask the questions and get those answers. Like, what do you recommend?

RONAN CARREIN: So the great news is, is that it’s a six bird, one stone type of situation. The answer to this is the same answer to how do you deal with regulation and with your lawyers.

It’s the same answer to how you maintain truth across like multiple like stakeholders in your organization. It’s the one answer for all of them. You fundamentally need to get to a point where you understand, uh, what your data sources are and what the data means. And like, and when I say what the data means, it’s as stupid as, uh, if you open a table and it says, you know, date of something and you have half the organization, which assumes it’s the date where the product was sent and half the organization assumes is the date when the product was invoiced.

And then it’s two weeks in between you have totally different results for the month in terms of accounting and financial reports and everything. So just first of all, like making sure there is a data owner and the data governance where somebody actually is somebody’s job is actually to say, I am certain of what the data means in our, in our different systems, that’s, that’s critically important.

Then the one part that helps with literally everything is to have a clean data mapping. Data mapping means literally, it could be just like a spreadsheet. It means I have those data sources, They come from here, and they’ve been collected under those rules. They are owned by those people, and I know where they go, how they are being processed, for what use, and this is the benefit for the user of me processing the data this way.

If you just have that document, First of all, whenever somebody needs to add something, there’s a new data source, you buy a company, a new brand, a new line of product, you know, it’s, you know what you’re plugging into, it’s like, you know, if you’re in somebody’s kitchen and you have to empty the dishwasher, you can open the drawers, and if you see where the forks are, so you see where the forks go, so you’re going to put them in the right place.

It’s just that idea that enables your lawyers to work with your content, because they say, well, okay, this is fine, like, uh, All right, let me look at your intentions for this year. You want to take this data and move it there for that purpose. Well, you can do that or you cannot do that, or you can do this under certain conditions.

Uh, if you don’t have that data mapping, it’s the same as asking for building permit. I just want to buy a house. Nah, you can’t. Well, come on, why? I can’t.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: I almost have to laugh here because I think what you’re saying is that most organizations, when they don’t have that hygiene, they basically emptied the dishwasher and they put a fork here and a fork there.

It’s like, I don’t like, there might be a fork in that cabinet and maybe two times there. So you’re on business down here, right?

RONAN CARREIN: I want to, I want to pursue with this. Imagine that exact situation. Somebody is in your house. And he opens the dishwasher and then maybe a bunch of boxes because you just moved and he puts things completely randomly.

Now, this is the state of what seven, I would say 75 to 85 percent of the data infrastructures that I find on client side and what I ask them, how did you get to that? That’s actually a good answer to your previous question. How do we get to the point when they ask for services? Because they said literally, well, we had that problem and that guy bought that thing.

And then we had that other problem and that other guy implemented that thing, which was conflicting with that. But. I think we’re making it work and then we implemented that other thing, but it’s been broken for two years. Nobody knows how it works. So we’re going to leave it at that. We’re too afraid of them plugging it.

And then this is my first party data infrastructure, which looks like a real, the general slump. Um, and, um, and this is very much what happens a lot. And one of the things that is actually absurd is when people say, yeah, I’ve already blown a lot of money in software licenses and everything into this. I don’t want to blow any more money into this.

Well, guess what? If you unplug all the things that is completely useless and you replace it by something that is lean and functional, you would probably save money on year one. And that’s really something that, that, that’s super important. But yeah, no, it’s exactly this. It’s exactly what happens. Um, and, and the, the first, uh, you know, uh, uh, item of the day should be start by cleaning your room so people can just live in it.

And that’s what we don’t see a lot with data.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: And, I mean, you’re a fan of a lot of the Google tools, I think, right?

RONAN CARREIN: When it comes to putting your data and querying it. It doesn’t have to be Google tools from BigQuery a lot for one very simple reason. Um, it’s very much pay as you go. Um, and the Google tools,

I always said the same stuff. Um, if you give a thousand fitness applications to people that are, You know, in need of more fitness in their life, and you just leave it at that, and you come back in two years, for most people, nothing will have happened. The people who have done something are the people who have, let’s say, a coach, a doctor, a psychologist, supporting family members, and all of those people coming together to support motivation, have them, you know, set up a goal and fight for it.

Then the fitness application is hugely instrumental. Um, It’s absurd to spend like 25, 000 a month in a fitness application and not a dime in a coach. So when it comes to data, Google’s doing a great job in that regard because they have a product that’s kind of just like a box of Lego bricks. Like, unfortunately, they don’t tell you much about what you can do with it and they’re pretty poor at that and they know it.

I’m still in touch with many people there. Uh, but that’s not what they try to do. Uh, they are technology providers. Uh, with a hint of solutionism. And what they’re saying is, look, like, learn how to use the stuff. It’s pretty amazing. And then you can do a lot of things with it. Which I concur. Um, you don’t pay a lot to use BigQuery.

Um, you should spend your money in, in, in like hiring, you know, people internally or externally that know how to play with it. To make it, you know, drive revenue. And in that regard, this is where we rely on them. It’s, it’s safe, it’s reliable. Um, and it’s, it’s hyper connected with everything else. So it’s rare that you have to build a connector from scratch.

Uh, you know, or an API or anything.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: So, uh, so get some good help. And, um, of course your company can help with that as well. Right. If people need, okay, Rona, that’s all great. So, uh, final question here before we start wrapping up, but what do you see as the future of privacy regulation? Um, so we’ve talked a lot about like improving your campaigns with first party data about having hygiene.

Uh, is there anything on the horizon that might change what we’re talking about when it comes to GDPR? Or privacy regulation in the United States. In

RONAN CARREIN: the United States, you’re making the question even more complicated. So, um, I’d say when the regulation came up, my first reaction as a Google sort of like product and go to market guy was, ah, bummer.

Um, and then I realized after a little bit of time that. The entire industry got insanely lazy in the last 20 years. You had platforms selling you advertising and the reporting to report on their own performance based on something cookies, which is fundamentally incredibly weak from a reporting standpoint.

So people forgot how to do what insurance companies did in the eighties, which is segmenting their data and like building propensity model of who’s likely to cause an accident more than another. And so on. So I think there’s a fundamental thing that is, is good about this is, Just forcing people into better business hygiene.

I don’t think I think in 20 years people will look back and say, Oh my God, our business improved so much, not because of the targeting thing, but just because we started auditing our business properly. Uh, so I think it’s important to say that before I answer your question. Cause it means my tech on regulation is.

It’s not necessarily bad at all, even from a street business standpoint, even all you care about is making money. I still don’t think it’s bad at all. Uh, so with that in mind, it’s kind of hard to tell. Like, uh, I, I talk a lot with like, uh, you know, law firms and people that are in charge of the tech, like partners in charge of the tech aspects.

And, um, and they don’t see any, uh. Any much clearer than we can at this stage. I think the regulator in Europe wants to tighten the screw even more when it comes to, uh, ensuring that any piece of data is being consented. Um, I don’t necessarily see that as wrong. Uh, you know, as a consumer, it was Black Friday recently, and I did most of my browsing based on emails that I received from brands that I like, and I would like to keep on receiving those emails because, you know, I made a few good deals.

Like everybody was happy about that. Consumers in the end will see their own interest and, uh. I think if the company that provides the greatest interaction in value exchange is going to win, then it’s probably for the better. Um, I’m more afraid of like, I’m more afraid of, um, the direction I feel like they are taking is, is the minute that This is a difficult question because I have a lot of ideas in mind around this, but I think you got companies like Facebook were looking at the, you know, maybe we should make people pay and screw this entire like thing.

It’s just like they either pay or they get ads and this is where they go. Google is probably looking at it from the angle of like a more Tony Stark type of approach. Like I can probably make a thing that’s compliant and enables the same type of targeting if it’s like, You know, like if it’s happening on the browser instead, and then blah, blah, blah.

And, you know, they try with flocks, some things, et cetera. And it’s like very elegant, but it’s. There’s no way like the average agency is going to look at this and like, yeah, sure, like that makes total sense. Um, so I think, uh, regulators, in my opinion, are not any more, any savvier, uh, technology.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Absolutely not, right?

And I think with Meta, they basically said, listen, we’re going to charge so much money that no reasonable user is going to want to pay. Yeah, of course. Exactly. Starting from a point, like you said, even if the cost was reasonable, like 20 a month for access to Gmail and maps and Google search, which are like, I couldn’t live my life without that.

Like I’d gladly pay 20 for it. Uh, but now it’s like saying, Hey, you got to pay a hundred dollars a month for that.

RONAN CARREIN: The best example is when you move out of your parents house and you realize you got to pay for tap water. You’re like, what? You know, it’s exactly this. Uh, so where is it going? Objectively. I think probably looking at the, the political trend will be a better source of like guests and looking at the technology itself.

Um,

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: But until then, I think like, um, maybe let’s not look too far into the future. For now, first party data, you are permitted. If you’ve gotten the permission generally to work with it, gets great results. Um, so people want to know more, Ronan, where can they find you?

RONAN CARREIN: Uh, well, uh, as of today, the person who is in charge of our U.

S. business is enjoying a maternity leave. So please leave her alone. Uh, so, uh, in the meantime, they can contact me. Uh, either directly at the Ronan, R O N A N at better stronger. com. I’m wearing the company t shirt represent, um, because we, we do some pretty cool offsite. So you have nice t shirts as well.

Um, so that, that would be the best way I’m going to, I’m going to back her up for the time being, uh, in terms of like, uh, uh, you know, bidding the U. S. markets. Uh, you can check our website, uh, which is, uh, Uh, actually covering a lot of the other areas of expertise that we do because the positioning of our companies, we try to go from strategy and just like, you know, digital strategy design all the way to implementation.

So we cover a lot of the other jobs that agency may cover. The primary area of expertise is putting a data backbone in the middle. So yeah, Ronan at betterstronger. com. I’m sure you can put that in the link somewhere. More than happy to, uh, more than happy to talk to, uh, to some people. We, we, uh, don’t necessarily have to build your entire data infrastructure.

If you simply want to have some, uh, some advice, some training, uh, for your leadership team, those kinds of things, we do all that kind of stuff, but I’m not going to take the time to, uh, It’s not the point.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: I mean, I think the best pitch is always education, right? So I think what you’ve shared with all of us today are some ideas on how to improve your business.

Uh, the business fundamentals and that would be to create outcomes like better ROAS, better reporting. Countless, countless, countless real life use cases that we’ve implemented on how to leverage first party data.

RONAN CARREIN: I would say. If you need the one last little push to get into this is I use Legos before as an analogy.

If you like Legos, you’re going to love this stuff because it’s like here is everything that you have and everything that you didn’t know you could do. And suddenly you want to build spaceships and castles and like you can do so much for your business playing with that data. And we realized that.

Getting you excited about it and the educational part is, is critical because it’s scary and this is something we love to do in that part as well, it’s just building the excitement around it.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: And if you like Legos and you need that little book of instructions, you can also go to Better Stronger and they can probably provide that playbook for you.

Hey, so Roland, this has been fantastic. Thanks everybody for watching these episodes. Please hit the subscribe button and also use the comments to let us know what you thought. If you have any other questions and we’ll see you for the next PPC Town Hall episode. Thank you. Thank you. And, uh, I mean, you were at Google.

Any, any good Google stories before we jump into first party data?

RONAN CARREIN: You mean any good Google stories that you can keep in that podcast? No, I would say, look, there’s one. I don’t know if I’m too proud of this one, but I think the very first time that I encountered Larry Page a very long time ago, I think he was in his 30s, 30s himself.

My very first job at Google, I might have been two, three months on the job. My job was to, uh, control that an algorithm was identifying adult material as adult material. Um, so very, uh, dull job coming out of a PhD program. Yes, no, yes, no, yes, no, it’s porn. Um, and I was in the middle of my PhD program.

Workstream, let’s put it this way with all the, all the implications, uh, when it comes to what was displayed on my screen at that very moment, and suddenly everybody turned very silent around me. And, uh, Larry page was right above my shoulder with his arm crossed staring at my screen, which was displaying, uh, well, you know, something significantly below the belt.

Um, which led me to the most confusing introduction that I’ve ever done of myself in my entire life. I don’t know if he remembers that, but, uh, that was quite embarrassing. Good memory.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah, well, that’s really interesting the way that you met Larry Page that way. But at least you were working hard. Uh, maybe a little awkward situation there.

But what you were doing. I mean, when I joined Google, there was no algorithm for this. So basically it was the humans. And that, that was part of the job was just sitting there and going through the ads and some of them were stuffed below the belt and we had to make sure we worked quickly because otherwise we would have big problems.

RONAN CARREIN: For those who know Google, I was not the ads bin, it was the adsense bin. So I was looking at actual content, usually UGC. Not just ads, which was, uh, you know, spicy. And, uh, the last thing I forgot to mention is my screen was pointing directly at the micro kitchen. So anyone who was having a cup of coffee on that floor was staring at this. So it was bound to happen.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Did people have a lot of coffee?

RONAN CARREIN: Uh, well, back in the days, uh, people were still ecstatic at the idea of having a limitless Kinder Bueno. So, um, I would say, uh, yeah, there was a lot of people in the micro kitchen.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah, exactly.