Audiences & targeting
Third-party data
Third-party data is audience information collected by an entity with no direct relationship to the person, packaged into segments and sold for targeting. Cookie deprecation, privacy regulation and platform walls have reduced its availability and reliability across much of digital media.
In practice
Where still available, third-party segments vary wildly in construction quality; interrogate how a segment is built before paying a data fee for it.
The planning direction of travel is toward first-party data, platform-native signals, and contextual approaches that do not depend on individual identifiers.