Adidas and the new wave of first-party data plays in the digital landscape | WARC | The Feed

Adidas and the new wave of first-party data plays in the digital landscape

With the ‘Creators Club’ membership programme to drive participation and connection with the brand and bring in all-important first-party data, the German sportswear and fashion giant Adidas typifies the new wave of methods being adopted to reduce the growing cost of reaching customers online.

Why it matters

Following strict privacy changes, like Apple’s App Tracking Transparency policy – which saw just 26% of global users and 16% of lucrative US users allow advertisers to track them – in addition to the pandemic-induced shift online, reaching people online is getting harder and more expensive.

One option is to go for brand building through traditional means like billboards, TV, and sponsorship around the kinds of content and events that your target audience tends toward. The other is to build your own first-party data set rather than expecting others to tell you, which is what we have seen from Adidas.

What’s happening

The rush to e-commerce meant that doing business online was far from a silver bullet; it became, instead, table stakes. Now, meeting those stakes and having the data that can tell you who to speak to and whether it’s working is much harder to find.

Conversions on Facebook and Instagram have been hit particularly hard, according to industry insiders, dropping by as much as 30% in Q3. For the luxury segment, the kinds of higher-income individuals that favour Apple devices mean that online advertising has become particularly difficult.

It comes at a bleak and difficult time for companies that are watching the costs of their tangible operations – making and moving goods – increasing.

Bottom line

You can’t rely on one ad company anymore, be that Meta or Alphabet. It is increasingly crucial to build your own data and to learn how to use it to inform your ads across channels.

Sourced from WARC, Business of Fashion