ViralGains and LiveRamp Partner to Expand Reach to Zero-Party Data-Driven Audiences
ViralGains, a zero-party data gathering and advertising platform, and LiveRamp, a data enablement platform, are partnering to expand the reach of ViralGains’ privacy-safe audiences.
ViralGains offers solutions that help marketers collect information consumers willingly provide via conversational ads and content. It translates that data into what it calls zero-party audiences and “VoiceAlike” audiences based on inferred data. LiveRamp will now make that data available to its vast marketing audience across platforms.
The partnership comes as privacy changes like Apple’s AppTrackingTransparency and Google’s forthcoming elimination of the third-party cookie on Chrome make it harder for advertisers to target consumers with behavioral data-driven advertising, especially across platforms.
ViralGains and LiveRamp are positioning their partnership as a solution to that problem.
“ViralGains’ ability to deliver quality audiences based on declared data (Zero-Party Audiences) and inferred data (VoiceAlike® Audiences), combined with LiveRamp’s ability to port those audiences across different platforms, makes way for a new approach to audience targeting that has the consumer’s voice at the center,” the partnership release argues.
The companies also claim that “ViralGains’ VoiceAlike Audiences outperform third-party segments across KPIs including Brand Lift, CTR, and on-site actions.” Marketers will be able to use the data provided by the partnership to “match audiences to over 250 million consumers,” they continue.
The big picture with zero-party data
Zero-party data has generated ample attention in the past couple of years as marketers determine how to collect data from customers and use that data to drive targeted marketing in the privacy era. Regulations such as CPRA and GDPR as well as privacy changes by Google and Apple have made third-party data, which is often probabilistic, aggregated, and used without consumers’ knowledge less practical to use, if not entirely inaccessible.
The benefits of zero-party data are obvious from a privacy perspective, but it does come with complications. From an accuracy standpoint, having consumers tell you what they do and want is not necessarily as accurate as observing their behavior, as with first-party data. The zero- and first-party data company DISQO has called this the say-do gap: the chasm between what consumers say and what they actually do.
Secondly, just because consumers willingly offer data doesn’t mean it is infinitely privacy-safe. For example, if Nike collects zero-party data from shoppers and then offers it to partners to drive targeted ads without Nike shoppers’ consent, is the information still privacy-safe? Zero-party data, in other words, isn’t a panacea for privacy if all it means is data consumers willingly provide brands.
That said, it makes sense that zero-party data marks a significant improvement on third-party data, which is infamously inaccurate and divorced from the consumers whom it is used to target. On the whole, zero-party data represents brands moving in the right direction on privacy. The catch is simply to avoid assuming that it either solves all privacy concerns or offers complete accuracy, which is something marketers can solve for by ensuring they only use data, even zero-party data, with consumers’ consent and that they corroborate data with multiple sources.
