When Google first announced in early 2020 its plans to end support for third party cookies, it quickened a growing movement amongst brands to better understand their customers by strengthening their capabilities in first party data.

That led to a rush of investment in data management tools – most commonly in the form of customer data platforms (CDPs). The market for this toolset was estimated by Fortune Business Insights to be worth US$3.28 billion ($5.08 billion) in 2025.

While Google subsequently announced it was scrapping its deprecation plan in July 2024, few brands would consider their first party data investments wasted, with Fortune Business Insights confident that the CDP market would continue to see growth of greater than 20 percent until at least 2032.

This growth is driven by the desire of marketers to provide strong and personalised experiences, and that means getting to really know their prospective and current customers in every way they can.

Letting the data do the walking

With 18 brands spread across 850 stores and 36 websites, tracking customer data at the footwear and apparel retailer Accent Group provides a unique challenge for its centralised marketing team and its head of marketing technology Stuart Heggie.

For the past 18 months Heggie has been on a quest to modernise the company’s marketing stack and find efficiencies while delivering new data capabilities.

A key element of that work has been the implementation of the Amperity CDP, which is assisting with plans to allow individual brand owners within Accent Group to act with greater autonomy for their go-to-market strategies.

With so many brands in market, Heggie said it had been critical that Accent Group built a data stack that required minimal technical intervention.

One of the goals for the CDP is to help identify when the same customers were shopping across brands, or when a person in one household might be purchasing on behalf of another.

“We want to be able to identify lifetime spend for households, such as the ability to track families that purchase kids’ shoes right through to youth and then adult shoes,” Heggie said.

“So what contributed quite heavily to our choice of CDP was that the fuzzy logic and the ability have some control over the priority of certain attributes that we capture, to understand who they are.”

One of the side effects of this capability has been to increase Accent Group’s unique profile count.

“We were expecting it to go down, but it actually increased as we identified different traits,” Heggie said.

Accent Group has also been applying AI to its new data capabilities – at first for driving recommendations, but later for improving its understanding of lifetime value and calculating propensity models.

“The brand teams have been able to find those nuggets where they previously wouldn't,” Heggie said.

“For Athlete’s Foot, we've got the ability to identify customers and the types of products they purchase, and then we've got modelling to predict the propensity for the category they're likely to purchase next.”

Now he is looking at the opportunity to use large language models to help marketing teams build segments, using semantic tagging of data assets to pull segments together and then apply propensity modelling to quantify the potential value of that customer base.

“Our brands can then make a decision on whether it's a cohort worth going after, or even suppressing,” Heggie said.

“The suppressing part is the almost equally as exciting, as obviously you don't want to spend on marketing that we're not going to get a purchase out of.”

While implementation of the CDP aligns with Accent Group’s longer-term plans to offer greater personalisation in its offers, Heggie said it was only scratching the surface of what was possible in terms of using that capability to optimise its conversion rates.

“We're now at a point where we are able to start leveraging our enriched customer data through our CDP integrations, so we're looking at leveraging really complex segmentation to deliver experiences,” Heggie said.

“We've got modelling to help nudge customers or provide real-time campaigns or real-time conversion uplifts like coupons to help them across the line.”

Local knowledge

While first party data is vital for most marketers today when engaging with their customers, it is also playing an increasingly important role for media companies that are wanting to help them on the mission.

Hence first party data management has been a critical investment for Australia's multicultural and multilingual public broadcaster, SBS, and its senior data and commercial product manager Claire Lawler.

“We've got linguistically and culturally diverse audiences, which are really sought out by marketers, so we engage technologies that can connect marketers to those audiences and then ultimately prove the value of targeting audiences across SBS,” Lawler said.

“We use technology that helps to engage brands and agencies to plan, target and then report on media buyers across SDS and so we look at technologies that can do each part of that value chain through to then proving the ROI or the return on investment or investing their marketing dollars with us.”

At the heart of this capability is a CDP from Adobe, which pulls data from a Snowflake data lake. One of the benefits of this combination was that it had given SBS the ability to allow audience members to voluntarily opt out of seeing content from certain advertising categories, such as that from wagering, alcohol and quick service restaurants.

 “There's a cohort of people who feel strongly about this, so it's important for us to be able to offer this capability to them, so audiences can contact us and request to opt out,” Lawler said.

“That data is processed in the CDP, and because of our connectivity to our ad platforms, we're able to send that into each of the ad serving environments to suppress ads from those particular categories for those users – its as simple as that.”

As valuable as SBS’ audience data might be, marketers are increasingly wanting more, so Lawler and her colleagues have created the capability for that data to be enriched with other sources, through relationships with partners including Coles360, Experian, and Smarter Experience.

“We have over 12 million registered users from on-demand today, so we do have significant scale for our logged in universe,” Lawler said.

“Platforms like Adobe and Snowflake enable us to strike up these partnerships in really privacy-centric ways.”

Lawler said data matching and collaboration was becoming increasingly important to brands who wanted to realise the benefits of connecting their own data investments.

“We're having interesting conversations in that space, and we think we have the right technology in place to provide some interesting options for our clients,” she said.

“We're also looking at using privacy-centric identifiers that would enable more data matching and collaboration.

“So we're keeping an eye on those emerging technologies and looking to implement them as it makes sense.”

Making it personal

At Brighter Super, the desire to create personalised journeys has been complicated by the company’s creation, which saw two industry super funds come together with a retail super fund.

That unusual origin has created interesting challenges for Brighter Super’s head of customer experience Brad Hancock as he focuses both on retaining the customers he has while building offers to attract new ones. In either case, personalisation is a key aspect of the strategy.

“Every interaction and engagement and touchpoint is critical in building a member's retirement pathway,” Hancock said.

“Each member has their own unique retirement journey, so it's about being in the right channel, engaging them through the means in which they want, but also making it empathetic and relatable.”

Hence many of Brighter Super’s martech investments have been to improve member profiling through segmentation and interaction tracking, based on a Salesforce CRM, a data warehouse from Databricks, and with Sitecore acting as its digital window to the world.

“It's about bringing in that experiential data and operating data so we can enable, discussions and nudges with members as they go through their journey,” Hancock said.

“We're exploring our customer data platform to see how we can unify disparate data and how bring in marketing advice and operations into that experience.

“We see from an industry perspective a huge consolidation of CDP and CRM platforms, and prioritising first party data is going to be a real challenge as cookie depreciation takes hold.”