If your data is isolated in a silo, you can’t get maximum value from it. That’s why data portability in marketing is so important.
What is Data Portability?
Data portability refers to the extent to which you can move data from one environment, such as a DMP, demand-side platform (DSP), supply-side platform (SSP), ad server or ad verification platform, to another. It’s the free flow of information across the internet.
Typically, data needs to be in formats that are interoperable among systems to transfer between them. Integrations between systems can help facilitate the movement of data. Concerns about portability are especially common with companies that use cloud environments, since it enables customers to move data and applications between cloud service providers.
A DMP gives marketers and advertisers insights into their audience and the performance of their campaigns and content. But to use those insights and data, you need to get it into a system that allows you to take action — such as targeting ads. The more portable your data is, the more value you can get from it. That’s why Lotame provides integrations with every major marketing and advertising platform and will work with you to send your data to any activation channel you want to.
Benefits of Data Portability
Who does data portability benefit? Increased data portability has a lot of potential benefits for companies and consumers. In this post, though, we’ll focus on how it can help marketers, 78 percent of whom use data systematically.
1. Use the Same Data on Multiple Platforms
Data that doesn’t work with other systems isn’t portable. It must be kept in what’s often called a “walled garden” — a system that doesn’t allow data to flow out of it. As an advertising professional, this limits what you can do with your data and the value of the insights you can derive from it. If that data is portable, however, you can send it to a new platform, or multiple platforms, any time you want. This gives you more freedom to choose among providers.
Lotame is media-agnostic, which means you can send your data from our platform to anywhere you want. We maintain integrations with all of the major DSPs, SSPs, ad servers, ad verification platforms, measurement tools and many other systems. You can even send your data to other DMPs. We provide integrations with Google, Twitter, Adgear, AppNexus and many more.
Let’s say, for example, that you are an online clothing retailer. You likely have a profile of your customers that includes some demographic information and their purchase history on your site. With non-portable data, your insights may stop there. If you have portability, however, you could combine that information with insights from social media or a data marketplace to deepen your understanding of your customers’ interests and engage with them more effectively.
2. More Flexibility
You shouldn’t have to worry that your data will get stuck in one system. It’s your data, so you should be able to do what you want with it and get as much value as you can out of it. That’s why Lotame doesn’t control what you do with your information like some other DMPs (or DSPs who say they’re DMPs). Circumstances are constantly changing in today’s business world, so you want as much flexibility as possible so you can adapt to them. That’s one of the major benefits of data portability for advertisers. It allows for that flexibility and puts you in control of your data.
3. Choose Any Media Source
With data portability in advertising, in addition to being able to send your data anywhere, you can pull in data from any media source, whether it’s online, offline, mobile, search, social, or beyond. Any audience data you can get that might be useful is accessible and easy for you to activate and combine with other insights. You’re not limited to data in the same format as what’s already in your DMP or what your DMP allows you to access. You can take full advantage of everything that’s available, giving you an edge over your competition and helping you improve your marketing strategies.
4. Maintain the Most Up-to-Date Data
Data is more valuable when it’s current. It loses value over time as information and circumstances change. You might gather intelligence on customers’ locations, which might eventually become inaccurate as customers move from place to place. If you keep that information in a silo and their location gets updated in a different system, you won’t be able to access it and update your records to keep your data useful. This is crucial, since 67 percent of marketers say data helps them make more accurate decisions.
For example, you can gather geo-location data from mobile phones, so you know where people are. If they move and update their social media information you can combine their social media data in a DMP, you’d be kept up-to-date. If that data weren’t compatible, though, you’d have old information that is no longer valuable. If you target them based on their previous location, your ads might be less effective.
5. Increased Internal Coordination
Data portability can enable you to share data and information across your organization to various departments and office locations — basically, to any employee, client or another stakeholder you want to. Portability allows you to spread awareness of your DMP and the insights it provides across your organization without requiring everyone to learn how to use the DMP. They can access it in whatever program they’re most comfortable with.
That’s exactly what one of our partners, Greenlight Digital, did when they started using our DMP. The portability we provide enabled them to build custom dashboards with our application programming interface (API) to allow their employees and clients to access their audience insights.
6. Reduced Export Effort
Being able to export your data to various platforms is important, but being able to do so easily makes it even more valuable. We provide a high number of integrations and we’ve built easy-to-use export functionality into our DMP as well. Because it’s so easy to access data from our DMP, you don’t have to invest nearly as much time into moving it from place to place. You achieve portability with minimal effort.
With simple export functionality, moving data from place to place does not require a huge investment. This enables you to try out more platforms and combine more insights to derive greater value from your information and get results faster.
7. Improve Data Analysis
All of this portability means improved data accuracy, analysis and insights. When you can send data between platforms, you can combine the customer data you have with other information and insights in a single platform. This means you’ll have more information to draw conclusions from, making those conclusions more accurate. You can also gain deeper insights into who your customers are, which helps you engage with them more skillfully.
These advanced insights will help you develop better marketing strategies, improve your customer service and make more sales. Overall, it leads to more successful advertising and a better bottom line.
Data Portability Laws
Data portability is such a major concern that some forward-thinking countries and industries require it.
After four years of deliberation, the European Union approved the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in 2016, which reworks the Union’s data and privacy laws. The EU will begin enforcing the new law in May 2018. The United Kingdom chose to adopt similar rules.
Among the requirements of the GDPR is the right to personal data portability. The law is designed to allow individuals to access their personal data and move it between IT environments safely, securely and without compromising usability. To comply with the new rules, organizations will have to provide people with personal data they’ve collected about them in a “structured, commonly used and machine-readable” format free of charge within one to two months if they request it.
Learn More About Lotame and Data Portability Today
Whether or not data portability laws apply to them, many private companies are taking the issue into their own hands and making their data more readily accessible and transferable between systems.
Lotame is one such company. We believe that you should be able to do what you want with your data and that being able to easily transfer it between systems makes it more valuable. That’s why we’re media-agnostic and will work with you to send your data from our platform to any other platform. Our DMP and all our other products are designed with data portability in mind so you can use your information how you see fit and use it to develop optimal advertising strategies.
To learn more about the products and services we offer, contact us today.