During his first four months leading the INMA Advertising Initiative, Gabriel Dorosz has become convinced “first-party data is the single biggest success factor for profitability in the digital advertising era.”

And the numbers back him up: 62% of marketers say they are prioritising first-party data investment over the next two years, and 55% of advertisers report they prefer to spend with publishers who have strong first-party capabilities.

For news companies, this data translates into higher CPMs, greater pricing power, and more monetisable inventory. It allows them to transact more through premium programmatic channels rather than being stuck in the open marketplace, where, on average, 59 cents of every ad dollar goes to middle-men.

But Dorosz stressed that the path is not simple and challenges abound.

“Digital and data acceleration is complicated,” he said. “It is much, much more complicated than a print-driven business.”

That complexity includes such things as identity resolution across devices, data quality and integration, privacy regulations that differ by market, and the complexities of measurement and vendor selection. Internal issues, including alignment across departments, budget limitations, and a shortage of talent and technical expertise, add further friction.

But, while the challenges are significant, Dorosz clarified the payoff is real: more revenue, stronger advertiser relationships, and a sustainable future in a post-cookie world.

At the INMA Master Class on First-Party Data Activation for Advertising, media leaders from Financial Times, The Washington Post, Ekstra Bladet, and The Globe and Mail shared insights into their company’s data-powered sales and activation strategies.

Financial Times builds internal tools

To fully leverage its first-party data, the Financial Times has developed a suite of internal tools that support campaign planning, execution, and optimisation.

One such tool is the blocklist scanner, which addresses the growing trend of advertisers supplying extensive keyword block lists. While intended to ensure brand safety, these lists often inadvertently block valuable inventory.

“This allows us to have informed conversations with them and offer more consultative approach to brand safety,” Ben Holt, head of advertising measurement and analytics, said, adding that in one case, the tool helped reduce blocked inventory from 70% to less than half — unlocking new opportunities whilst maintaining safety.

FT also uses a bespoke white space analysis tool to identify underutilised content areas where branded campaigns could thrive. This helps advertisers align with emerging or niche topics and fill gaps in coverage, particularly in fast-moving areas like AI.

First-party data has become a core part of FT’s operations, and Holt noted its value extends across the entire industry. News publishers benefit because they can move beyond subscriptions and offer greater value to advertisers.

For advertisers, it means that a privacy-first environment doesn’t exclude them from targeting potential customers, Holt said: “The combination of contextual and first party has just given us stronger outcomes and should be the same for other publishers.”

And finally, audiences win, too.

“Audiences gain better ad experiences that align with what they’re reading. We know that users prefer contextually relevant ads, so improving the accuracy is actually in the interest of our users.”

Reusable audience personas at The Washington Post

The Washington Post has developed a scalable playbook that makes responding to client briefs faster, sharper, and more impactful.

One of the most impactful innovations from The Washington Post's strategy was the development of structured, reusable “audience personas,” built from a rich blend of behavioral and demographic signals.

Amelia Simpson, director of audience insights, was careful to distinguish these from simple targeting segments.

“These weren’t just analyst shortcuts or short codes in an ad targeting system,” Simpson said. “They were reusable narratives that sales could rally around. Each persona was grounded in deterministic traits and layered with behavioral, contextual, and editorial signals. So they are both credible in front of buyers and a convincing story, but also usable in activation.”

To build these personas with objectivity, the team employed natural language processing and clustering algorithms to analyse over 1,000 RFPs from the past three years. This data-driven process identified 20 core audience types that buyers actually requested, eliminating internal guesswork.

As Simpson noted, this method “removed the human bias, and some of the human assumptions about what we were being asked for out of the equation.”

The payoff was a dramatic increase in efficiency and speed. Once these personas were defined and integrated, the team’s workflow was transformed: “The result was that analysts could go from RFP ask to audience match in minutes instead of days.”

Ekstra Bladet creates Relevance 2.0

Ekstra Bladet started its first-party journey about five years ago. Thomas Lue Lytzen, director of ad sales and tech, said at the time no one else could fit the company’s needs, so it built its own platform.

Today, it doesn’t really stand out from other platforms: “In order to actually stand out in the market we need to actually do more, and that is what we’re working on.”

In response to the shifting market and the rising power of Big Tech, Ekstra Bladet is creating a new data platform, Relevance 2.0.

The process starts with contextual data, building interest-based segments, then creating clean rooms, working on models and demographic data, and further expanding data-wise, Lytzen said:

“We are not in a universe where everyone is logged in and neither will we get there, so we need to be able to say a lot of stuff on non-consented users, on consented anonymous users, logged in users…so this is the very matrix we’ve been working on.”

On the horizon is building a from-scratch clean room and standardising it, and exploring how to support third-party clean rooms. There are also plans on getting AI to do contextual work, revising UI needs that have been neglected, and, most importantly, focusing on creating insights models, how to do forecasting, and creating benchmarks.

“Google has one of the best documentation areas or universes where you can just get everything and we need to have that if we want our data to be used across borders,” Lytzen said.

The Globe and Mail’s clean room strategy

The Globe and Mail has successfully implemented clean room technology to drive better campaign performance and create tangible commercial advantages, Kabil Rahaman, head of commercial data, said.

A prime example of The Globe’s clean room strategy in action is its partnership with VIA Rail, Canada’s national rail service. In collaboration with their clean room provider, Optable, The Globe set out to test how securely matched first-party data could directly enhance campaign performance.

The first case study focused on driving awareness. The team designed a rigorous A/B/C test that compared three distinct targeting approaches: one using VIA Rail’s own customer data matched securely in the clean room, another using a lookalike audience modeled by The Globe, and a final one using a generic, off-the-shelf third-party travel segment.

The partnership’s second phase moved beyond brand awareness to directly measure impact on VIA Rail’s bottom line: ticket sales.

By leveraging the clean room, The Globe was able to securely connect ad exposures on its site to actual customer transactions, creating a direct link between advertising and revenue.

Rahaman shared the powerful results: “Of the ticket sales that happened during this period of time from Globe readers, 20% of them had an ad exposure. Knowing that there’s now an impact that advertising has on The Globe and how it helps sell tickets was a rather good way for us to demonstrate that advertising makes a difference.”

The proof became even more compelling over time.

“In subsequent quarters, we’ve found that ticket sales from Globe readers have roughly a 30% to 50% contribution to their ticket sales now. Almost half of the ticket sales from Globe readers have an ad exposure, which is pretty neat.”

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