Interesting read as published on adexchanger: Facebook’s Third-Party Data Pull-Back: Winners And Losers…

Facebook recently created a small panic in the marketing and data community when it announced that it would pull the plug on its Partner Categories program, therein eliminating third-party data sources from the platform.

The move is also stirring quite a few water cooler conversations about who wins and who loses in a world where one of the biggest platforms is no longer third-party data friendly. Perhaps March Madness has turned everything into a competition. Here’s where things could shake out:

The winners

• Fortune Top 150 advertisers: I’ll say this a few times so we all can hear it: Marketers will always focus on personalizing experiences for their customers and prospects. Those who have deep pockets and invested in large data environments, Hadoop clusters and data science teams won’t bat much of an eye. Some may even find that a bit of a shake-up delivers better-targeted campaigns.
• Ad agencies, particularly media agencies: The elimination of third-party data on Facebook heightens their role as data procurers, which may allow them to regain their roles as the go-to media strategists for their clients.
• Google and other top-20 publishers: Google is well-positioned since it has first-party data, accepts third-party data and has scale. Oath, eBay, Twitter and Pinterest are great alternatives that bring extensive first-party and third-party partnerships for targeting on their platforms. These types of major publishers with verified PII finally present an effective alternative to Facebook, even if they’ve pitched themselves as such for years.
• Demand-side platforms (DSPs): As marketers look for Facebook alternatives, DSPs will make sure all those third-party ready campaign resources are front and center. Leading DSPs are actually the de facto repository for marketers’ wealth of third-party data, and those that can show performance and even a touch of transparency will benefit.

The losers

• Data providers: Oracle Data Cloud, Acxiom and their like are obviously the biggest losers, and it doesn’t appear to me that they have any clear path to get that revenue back. The situation may even get worse for them if other large platforms follow Facebook’s lead on third-party data.
• Mid-size marketers: Mid-size marketers typically don’t have the in-house Hadoop capabilities that big advertisers have – and they will now have to procure their own data providers. Mid-size marketers who spend a lot of their budget on Facebook are about to find their world get more complicated – and expensive.
• Global marketers: While there are benefits for some major advertisers, global marketers stand to lose because Facebook was the leader in allowing marketers to leverage third-party data – it was a global play. Unfortunately, there is no significant alternate player outside Facebook, on a global scale, with an identity layer and a third-party layer.

Detailed article here: https://adexchanger.com/data-driven-thinking/facebooks-third-party-data-pull-back-winners-and-losers/

Official news from Facebook here: https://newsroom.fb.com/news/h/shutting-down-partner-categories/