There is so much emphasis on customer data at the moment. In the search for a competitive edge, marketers are focused on gaining the most valuable insight and building smarter and stronger personal relationships with their customers.

It should be no surprise then that data has not only become top of mind for marketers, but also incredibly valuable. Offline data is already a multi-billion pound industry and marketers are now well accustomed to paying substantial sums for access to online audience data. What continues to astonish me, however, is how so many marketers are failing to protect their own valuable data assets. In a world where data is worth billions, many marketers are giving their data away for free and losing their competitive edge in the process.

How can that be the case? What most marketers don’t realise is that they probably don’t own their data – and even in the case that they are trying to, many are failing to properly protect it.

The most common way for marketers to lose ownership of their data is through the use of agency trading desks. Many trading desk contracts give the trading desk – not the marketer – ownership of all customer and campaign data. This data gives trading desks, and the DSPs they work with, a customer profile which they can use for any purpose, including campaigns for a marketer’s competitors (because, after all, trading desks are not typically subject to client conflict arrangements).

The seemingly obvious solution for marketers in this case is to seek contractual protection of data. Although many trading desk contracts (if a contract exists at all), grant unfettered data rights to the trading desk, marketers could potentially negotiate away such provisions. This would be brilliant, if only it could solve the problem. Unfortunately, as any IT professional will tell you, data can’t be protected with only terms and conditions; it has to be protected by technology and operational processes surrounding the use of the data.

This is especially the case in digital advertising, where complex media plans including multiple DSPs and networks typically mean moving data out of a marketer’s owned and operated system (for instance, a DMP) and into the servers of third-parties, who have no relationship whatsoever with the marketer. Once that data moves into a system belonging to a third-party (say a DSP), that third-party can use the data in any way they see fit. Considering that many digital media buys pass through the hands of dozens of intermediaries, loss of control over data is practically inevitable.

So what can marketers do to protect their data while using it to create efficiency and value? First, make sure contractual protections are in place. With any partner that touches your data – from trading desk to DMP – insist on having full legal data ownership and being able to choose with whom data is share and how it is shared. Secondly, and most critically, ensure that you have not only contractual data ownership, but operational data ownership. This means simplifying your supply-chain (necessitating fewer “hops” for your data) and insisting that any party that uses your data has a direct contractual relationship with you. This includes both your DMP and the tools you use to execute campaigns (e.g. DSPs, e-mail service providers, site optimisation tools, etc.). Only by taking operational control, and not just contractual control, can marketers keep their data safe while making it actionable.