Marketers are under extraordinary pressure during holiday seasons, and 2025 is no different, writes Melanie Hoptman, VP and MD, brands and agencies, APAC at LiveRamp.
Acquisition costs continue to climb; advertising channels are more saturated than ever; in uncertain macroeconomic times, every campaign dollar faces heightened scrutiny. At the same time, the consumer journey continues to splinter across every destination, now including AI-driven chat and search. The result is a complex challenge: how do marketers connect the dots across these environments to find and convert customers at precisely the right moment?
Increasingly, the answer lies in data collaboration.
Turning Retailer Data Into Marketing Advantage
Retailers hold a wealth of first-party customer insights—not just in-store transactions coveted by marketers, but also loyalty behaviour and a range of other data benefitting from their proximity to the consumer. Historically, due to marketers’ relative distance from end-consumers, marketers have been unable to unlock these insights; without access to conversions and sales data, marketers’ best attempts to measure performance and connect it back to business outcomes have been extrapolations and guesses.
Data collaboration is changing the playing field by unlocking retailers’ data for marketers to leverage. As marketers get their first-party data strategies in order, collaborating with retailers helps marketers unify their view of consumers, connecting every step of consumers’ journeys through conversions and purchases. These capabilities matter most during high-volume periods like the Christmas season, when marketers are entering a critical period for measuring their sales and successes for the entire year.
A New Standard For Secure, Scalable Collaboration
Marketers who want to tap data collaboration with retailers are now turning to data clean rooms. As the pivotal piece in retail media networks, data clean rooms allow marketers and retailers to collaborate without ever exposing raw data. Marketers can collaborate their first-party data with retailers’ audiences to understand consumers’ habits, activate seamlessly across channels, and critically, to measure who’s converting to maximise the performance of investments, and reallocate where necessary.
During the holiday season, the benefits of this type of collaboration are immense. In a splintered consumer attention ecosystem, consumers’ habits—including media consumption—may be changing amidst the type of fragmentation inherent to CTV, or as families and individuals engage in holiday travel. Furthermore, in this intense make-or-break period for brands’ entire years, marketers can benefit from the cutting-edge transparency that data collaboration offers, enabling them to minimise wasted spend and quickly adjust tactics, putting more investment into what’s working and ultimately maximising sales.
A Critical Differentiator
Marketers can increase their strategic importance by connecting ad exposures directly to real-world conversions and purchases, and by highlighting the real business outcomes their campaigns drive. While winning Holiday 2025 is critical, sustainable gains from data collaboration turns marketing into winners throughout the year.
Data collaboration is no longer a behind-the-scenes technical function: it is fast becoming one of the most powerful tools for marketers to drive performance. As marketers increasingly prioritise retail media networks, and the data collaboration that underpins it, retailers who offer these capabilities will quickly become the top-priority partners for marketers looking to drive impact and measure their increase in performance.
