Third-party data
In practice, for a UK buyer
The paragraph above is the neutral answer. This is the part a vendor glossary leaves out.
It carries a real cost and a real provenance question. The cost appears as a CPM uplift on top of the media — around £2.50 per thousand on Bombora topics, £3.00 on Dun & Bradstreet. The provenance question is what a lawful-basis manifest exists to answer: which provider, on what basis, with which conditions still owed by you. Consent-chained means the provider asserts a consent chain, not that anyone downstream has verified every link in it, and this site does not claim otherwise.
What this one connects to
Most confusion in media buying comes from two adjacent terms being used interchangeably, so these are the neighbours worth reading next.
First-party data
Data an organisation has collected directly from its own customers and visitors — a CRM list, purchase history, site behaviour. Distinguished from third-party data by the existence of a direct relationship with the person it describes.
Audience segment
A named group of people a seller will let you target, defined by some combination of demographics, behaviour, stated interest or inferred intent, and identified in a buying system by a specific identifier.
Lawful-basis manifest
A record attached to every compiled channel plan naming each data source used, the lawful basis it relies on, the conditions that come with it, and the warnings raised while compiling — produced automatically rather than assembled on request.
TCF consent string
A standardised, encoded record of what a user consented to, produced at the point of collection and readable by every participant downstream. It is passed along the advertising supply chain so that each participant can check whether it has a basis to process that person's data before it does.
More on targeting and identity
How an audience is described to a seller, and how much of the description survives. Most of the honest difficulty in media buying lives here.
45 minutes. Bring a real brief and we compile it live. You describe one audience and watch it compile into seven targeting specifications, each with the score for how much of the definition survived.
Talk it through