Unmasking the Power Imbalance between Advertisers and Tech Giants
by Lou DiGiacomo, VP of Product
The Walled Garden Dilemma
Both first-party data and the AdTech walled gardens (Facebook, Google, etc.) are critical tools in a 2023 marketing plan. The industry dilemma, however, is that the walled gardens represent some of the most challenging places to activate a first-party audience.
This is because Facebook and Google have built their technologies to be as much of a closed ecosystem as possible and make it painful for brands to BYO data to the walled garden platforms.
Here’s how it gets messy:
- These walled gardens want you using not just their media platforms but their entire ecosystems—everything from data generation to audience targeting and attribution reporting.
- Facebook and Google tout their ability to build first-party data for you. There’s just one problem: they (not you) own these audiences, and they do not allow brands to extract these audiences out of the Google or Facebook platforms. By nature, they are incentivized against data independence.
- The walled gardens are also missing out on unreachable audiences, as most of their technology is based on either cookies or contextual insights.
- Measurement is just general, aggregated You might see general information, like broad audience behaviors, but you’ll never get to look at the individual shopper journey for specific buyers.
- Google and Facebook also have a large minimum audience size for activating first-party audiences, making granular targeting impossible for local & regional advertisers.
What does all this mean? Essentially, Facebook and Google alone are not an adequate first-party data solution for local and regional businesses. Any advertiser that is over-indexed in the walled gardens will miss out on significant revenue opportunities.
Partnering with a democratic data partner like fullthrottle.aiTM allows you to own your data and activate it anywhere in the media and advertising activation highway. You can unlock high match rates and activate first-party audiences with data-driven marketing. We’ll show you how in our step-by-step guide to solving the advertising match rate problem.
To read more about match rates, check out the articles below:
How To Reach More of Your Audience With Higher Match Rates
How Data Hygiene Unlocks High Match Rates
Unlocking High Match Rates in Data-Driven Marketing
