As the digital advertising landscape shifts away from third-party cookies and anonymous traffic, INMA Advertising Initiative Lead Gabriel Dorosz notes the wealth of information offered by first-party data, emphasising the urgency and opportunity for news companies to embrace this data.

“We don’t just mean logged-in data,” Dorosz said, adding that first-party data means “any kind of audience data that can be useful for selling advertising.”

The question many publishers may be asking is whether or not it’s too late to take advantage of first-party data, and his response assured INMA members there’s still time to jump on board. The time to do that, however, is now.

“In general, news publishers are behind the curve overall in terms of where the global advertising market is [now] and where it is heading,” he said. “Yet success and profitability increasingly comes from accelerated digital transitions in the news publisher space.”

He pointed to leading digitally focused publishers with mature data road maps who are finding success. Those publishers have created distinct ad products built on first-party insights and have achieved profitability as primarily digital advertising businesses.

At the recent INMA Master Class on First-Party Data Activation for Advertising, media leaders from CNN, Schibsted, The Washington Post, the New York Post, and the Hindustan Times shared how their companies are building the foundations of their first-party data strategies.

Crawl, walk, run to data maturity

Advertisers want accuracy. News publishers need trust. Users deserve privacy.

Could first-party data be the key to delivering it all? The answer is a resounding yes. To unlock its full potential, however, requires a strategically built infrastructure.

Kendell Timmers, senior vice president of data analytics, science, and insights at CNN, provided a pragmatic road map for turning that promise into reality.

Timmers outlined a phased approach to first-party data maturity: crawl, walk, run. This framework gives organisations a practical way to mature without overreaching too soon.

The crawl phase involves starting simple with existing signals. She suggested asking basic questions like: “Have you consumed sports content in the past 30 days? Have you watched long-form content in the past 30 days? Those are fairly simple, straightforward. Nobody has to be logged in to give you that information.”

Next, the walk phase incorporates advertiser-linked data or behavioural modeling. This means taking a client's customer list, matching it, and building lookalike audiences. As she described, this identifies users who “Read like Advertiser X’s customer ... . You match it, and then find out what that looks like, and do a lookalike.”

Finally, the run phase is about asking for user-provided data to model from a source of truth. This includes everything from foundational demographics to high-value segments. Timmers explained: “That’s the demographics, basic ones, like age. And then the more sophisticated ones, like business decision maker, which are enormously valuable audiences for advertising.”

Understanding the terrain at Schibsted

Christer Ljones, director of advertising data capabilities at Schibsted, began outlining the company’s data journey by detailing the terrain the team traversed.

“The terrain that you’re operating in is going to be giving you directions for what you can do,” he said. “You need to know your situation. You cannot read a case study and then copy and execute because there will be differences that will have real impact on what you can achieve.”

Schibsted has a unique reach and frequency, operating with multiple brands and devices, including Web, where 60% of their traffic is not authenticated. Apple and the E.U. write the rules by which they must play, Ljones said: “In practice you are losing 85-90% of the data points that you could have had on the user, so you’re not really living up to your potential.”

A large part of Schibsted’s terrain is that large marketplace, around which the team built a lot of its initial first-party data strategies.

This terrain shaped the company’s timeline, from DMP success with first-party data from 2012-2018 to third-party cookies and GDPR regulations in the last decade. Schibsted has lately been focusing on in-house advertising, matched audience leadership, and outcomes moving into the future.

“Given that we developed quite a lot ourselves, we saw that log-in and matching that to client data was a big opportunity for us,” Ljones said.

The data maturity journey

Every news company is at a different stage in their data journey and data maturity, said Josh Peters, former global head of commercial data strategy for The Washington Post. Peters outlined the stages of data maturity before walking participants through a data strategy framework.

The publisher data maturity journey consists of four stages:

Stage 1: data collection (foundational)
Data is siloed across systems with limited integration. Teams struggle to answer basic business questions. The focus is to centralise sources, establish governance, and create a baseline inventory.

Stage 2: data unification (connected)
Data begins flowing into a central environment. Profiles and segments are emerging. The focus is to build a unified data view and improve access for analytics and reporting.

Stage 3: data activation (monetised)
Audience segments are deployed in ad platforms, marketing tools, and subscription journeys. The focus is to connect data to revenue with audience targeting, personalisation, and churn reduction.

Stage 4: data optimisation (advanced)
Data drives strategic decisions across the business. AI, modeling, and predictive analytics are in play. The focus is on continuous improvement, experimentation, and cross-business monetisation.

To be able to go from data to revenue to AI readiness, Peters told INMA members the thing he wants them to be able to take away is that data’s the foundation for all of this.

“AI is the accelerant. Unless you have that data foundation ready, your AI is not going to be as good. It’s not going to be very successful. It will be the thing you can do more with once you have that core, and future readiness really requires both.”

Cross-department buy-in is key at the New York Post

When Google first announced it would phase out third-party cookies, many publishers hesitated; the New York Post was not one of them. Instead, the 241-year-old brand moved quickly to reimagine its data strategy, laying the foundation for ongoing advertising wins.

Amanda Gomez, senior vice president of revenue operations, walked INMA members through the company’s journey to transform the Post into a first-party data powerhouse.

A critical early step was securing executive and cross-department support. First-party data wasn’t a project for just one team, Gomez said. Editorial, finance, tech, advertising, and even commerce had to participate.

“Essentially, this initiative hits everyone,” Gomez said. “I’m not going to lie, it was not cheap and it definitely was an undertaking. So was trying to get their buy-in to understand.”

Different departments had different reasons for hesitating. For example, editorial teams were wary when data collection meant altering page layouts to insert quizzes or comments. Finance had to justify significant investment. But without shared commitment, Gomez said, “this was never going to work.”

The Post acknowledged it could not make such a significant change alone. With limited internal resources, it turned to three partners: Prohaska Consulting to audit existing capabilities, Aqfer to power its first-party identifier system, and ActionIQ to activate data across platforms and advertising products.

This combination allowed the Post to execute its plan more quickly and efficiently. Even so, it “was a labour of love across many departments and there was a lot of testing along the way.”

Maximising data at Hindustan Times

Tushar Garg, head of marketing and user growth at the Hindustan Times, said the company’s strategy transformation has been driven by a move towards data-driven, full-funnel, high-ROI advertising solutions.

Advertisers aren’t looking for mere impressions, Garg said. They want the right kind of audience that will give downward funnel conversions in an end-to-end integrated funnel.

It’s not only advertisers who are looking for more sophisticated delivery. Consumer behaviour is also changing, and they expect more relevant and personalised ads. The demographics are trending younger as well.

Increasing registrations and user consumption data were important for both analytics and improving the HT product. This pillar focuses on:

• Driving user registrations.
• Using device and geography based attributes.
• Offering personalised information products such as horoscope, local news, weather, credit score, board results, etc.
• Capturing consumption and interaction data.

“To build a robust first-party data strategy, you need to start collecting that data,” Garg said in conclusion. “Second, you need to innovate ad products, beyond the banner. And finally, you need to call for personalisation, cohort-isation, and contextuality to increase ROI.”

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