Across every organization, whether it’s in-house at a Fortune 500 corporation or an agency working on their behalf, every campaign and every project starts with a “simple” question—who is our audience? While this question is paramount to a successful campaign, it also tees up what is arguably the more important question behind the initial one—what do we know about our audience?

The proliferation of Retail Media Networks is a prime example of how organizations are re-evaluating their relationships with their consumer data, and new stakeholders are entering into the mix. Finance looks at the consumer data that marketing departments have been mining for years and thinks of how they can monetize the data to turn it into a new revenue stream. Gone are the days when your customer data was simply valuable information for marketing departments to know their target better and identify opportunities for new consumers. Now, organizations and brands that previously invested in advertising as a sales generation tool are betting heavily, in new ways, on the value of their owned data and its revenue potential for advertisers who want to reach their consumers.

As advertisers and marketers, this presents an opportunity for us to step forward and advocate for our own expertise to lead this conversation. We have advocated for better first party data for years to ensure that we efficiently identify and communicate with our target audiences. Now, we can speak to what others in our industry look for as the most valuable data types.

Deeper than this, it provides us an opportunity to educate our colleagues and teams on how micro-conversions, and other brand-to-consumer touchpoints, are valuable and relevant to creating consumer profiles, identifying potential partners, and business objectives. As we all know, it’s easier to advocate for something when you can tie a dollar amount to it—now we can.Consumer data is increasingly valuable to advertising from a tactical audience perspective, as personalization across fragmented consumer bases becomes more difficult and targeting capabilities are impacted. This change causes advertisers to look to other methods such as contextual targeting. It allows advertisers to present their messaging in a truly native way because they will inherently know more about the environment in which their Creative will live and (to some extent) how the consumer’s mindset will be at the touchpoint. Contextual targeting, in particular, presents additional opportunities for advertisers to advocate for our thoughtful and purposeful touch points as it requires poignant & relevant Creative for the intended target and all similar audiences who are consuming content related to this topic.

Now advertisers have more justification at our fingertips for influencing organizational priorities around data collection than we ever have before. We need to ensure that we prioritize the consumer, by thoughtfully and purposefully designing every touchpoint to provide the greatest chance for additional data collection. User Experience, Design, Data Science & Analytics, as well as, Finance, Legal and Operations—Advertising is positioned to bring all groups to the table and align on how best to craft consumer journeys that prioritize ethical and legal data collection across the entire customer journey.