Marketers Must Balance First-Party Data with Smart Supplementation: TransUnion’s Matt Spiegel

CANNES – Marketers’ obsession with first-party data is justified, but insufficient. That was the message from Matt Spiegel, executive vice president of TruAudience growth strategy at TransUnion, during an interview with Beet.TV’s David Kaplan at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

“You know, I think marketers are still really, really invested in understanding their own data, quote unquote, first-party data, their owned asset, which makes a lot of sense,” Spiegel said. “I think if anything’s shifting, or certainly what I hope continues to shift, is an understanding that while your own customer data is absolutely the foundational asset to start from, it’s not the only answer.”

Spiegel explained that no single company has all the consumer signals necessaary to reach everyone it wants. To scale and drive growth, marketers must not only deepen relationships with existing customers but also expand reach, and that requires data from outside their own ecosystems.

“You want to stitch it together as best possible to have as most fulsome view of the customer as possible,” he said, pushing back on the binary thinking that first-party data is “good” and third-party data is “bad.”

Role of third-party data

With media fragmentation now a permanent fixture of consumer behavior, Spiegel said third-party data plays a critical role in filling the gaps across targeting and measurement.

“Media fragmentation is not just a feature, not a bug — it is a feature. It’s the world we all live in,” he said. “Certainly the ability to triangulate a view of a consumer in a more holistic way such that you can create more of a reach-frequency model across all your media touchpoints makes a ton of sense.”

On the measurement side, third-party signals help brands go beyond superficial attribution.

“You’d like to understand why,” he said. “What other signals were common amongst the type of conversions that I received, and how can I maybe use those signals, model those signals to then create new strategies?”

Privacy: Not the opposite of personalization

While privacy concerns often shadow discussions about third-party data, Spiegel stressed that ethics and personalization can — and must — coexist.

“I don’t look at privacy as the opposite to personalization,” he said. “I look at them as partners in crime. We all care about — or actually any reputable party in this industry cares a ton about — ensuring that consumers are well represented, that they have the choice to be represented in the ways that they’re comfortable.”

Spiegel argued that better industry standards and compliance practices are necessary to ensure consumer protection without sacrificing relevance.

“It’s one of the reasons that TransUnion exists in this space,” he said. “We’ve been a regulated data entity for a long time… because that’s at the core of where we started in the credit business.”

Looking ahead: Promise of generative AI

As for what tools or strategies might help marketers strike the right balance between data types and scale personalization, Spiegel pointed to the growing influence of artificial intelligence.

“Obviously, we can’t have most of these conversations without thinking about generative AI here in some way, shape, or form,” he said. “There’s no doubt that generative AI is going to make the entire ecosystem evolve… going to allow us to focus less on what I often think of as the sausage making of the process and more on the strategy side of it.”

Ultimately, Spiegel sees a future shaped by more advanced analytics, streamlined operations, and a renewed focus on delivering the right message to the right person at the right time — ethically and intelligently.

“It’s a continued recognition that our industry can do a better job of creating the higher standards for what good data looks like,” he said.

Beet Retreat Berkshires; A Special Moment for the Media Community, TransUnion’s Matt Spiegel