Here, InfoSum NZ’s Tim Richardson argues why New Zealand has the edge in this new world of data collaboration.
For most of digital advertising’s history, the race was about ownership. Whoever acquired the most data won. Brands and platforms invested heavily in building data warehouses and proprietary data assets, accumulating consumer signals at scale. The logic was simple. More data meant better targeting, better outcomes, better returns.
That logic no longer applies.
Consumer awareness of how personal data is collected and used has grown considerably. Privacy regulation and governance expectations are tightening. Third-party cookies, long the backbone of digital tracking, are in terminal decline. And the media environment has fragmented across streaming platforms, apps and digital channels to a degree that makes any single organisation’s view of the consumer fundamentally incomplete.
There is also a more practical reality that the industry has been slower to acknowledge. Owning or procuring all the consumer signals you need is expensive, increasingly unrealistic, and overlooks the velocity of decay inherent in real-time behavioural data. By the time a brand has gathered a large dataset, portions of it are already out of date.
Different players, different truths
No single organisation has a complete picture of the consumer. What they have are different, genuinely valuable slices of it.
Brands hold customer relationships, purchase history and loyalty data. Media owners like TVNZ and ThreeNow hold content engagement, viewing behaviour and ad exposure data. Marketplaces like Trade Me hold search behaviour, browsing activity and some of the richest intent signals available anywhere in the market, including early indicators of upcoming purchases or significant life events.
Individually, each of these datasets is useful. Connected in a privacy-first way, they provide a much clearer picture of audience behaviour and purchase intent that no single party could construct alone.
This is also where data collaboration has a meaningful quality advantage over legacy approaches. First-party data matching operates on deterministic accuracy. It connects real, consented relationships between organisations and their customers. That is fundamentally more reliable than the probabilistic third-party datasets the industry has relied on for years, which were always an approximation at best.
Why New Zealand is well positioned
New Zealand’s media ecosystem is concentrated by global standards. A relatively small number of publishers and platforms command significant reach, and most of them hold high-quality first-party data. TVNZ, ThreeNow, Stuff, Mediaworks, NZME and Trade Me between them cover a substantial proportion of the country’s digital audience, and each sits on datasets that are genuinely distinctive.
That concentration, combined with well-established levels of trust between brands, media owners and consumers, makes it easier for organisations to form the kind of partnerships that data collaboration requires.
Data collaboration technology that allows multiple organisations to match and analyse their datasets without either party ever sharing their own data or seeing the other’s underlying data, make that collaboration practical. New Zealand brands have a real opportunity to build private data networks that connect insights across trusted partners to achieve better marketing outcomes.
Collaboration in action
The practical applications are already emerging. Consider an insurance brand that identifies audiences actively researching property or cars on Trade Me, then connects that intent signal to reach those same audiences on TVNZ+ as they watch home renovation or automotive content. Neither party has shared its customer data. But together, they have reached someone at precisely the moment a product becomes relevant to them.
Lookalike audience modelling offers another dimension. By matching first-party datasets, brands can identify consumers who share the characteristics of their highest-value customers and use that intelligence to drive acquisition at scale, without relying on broad, imprecise targeting. The same logic applies in reverse: suppressing existing customers from digital acquisition campaigns so that media budgets are directed entirely at genuine new prospects, not people who already have a relationship with the brand.
Measurement is also improving. Matching ad exposure data from a platform like TVNZ+ with a brand’s own conversion data makes it possible to understand which campaigns actually drove acquisitions. For an industry that has spent years optimising for click-through rates, closing that loop with meaningful return-on-ad-spend measurement represents a genuine step forward, especially in the BVOD space.
A different kind of competitive advantage
The advertising industry is in a new phase in its relationship with data. The old model rewarded scale and accumulation, while the emerging one rewards the ability to connect in a privacy-safe way.
New Zealand’s market structure, its concentrated ecosystem and trusted local players, creates genuine conditions for that shift to happen here. When organisations collaborate to link insights across their datasets while keeping the underlying data securely in place, they unlock a level of understanding that none could achieve independently.
The future of marketing will not belong to those who hold the most data. It will belong to those who know how to connect it. For New Zealand, the building blocks are already there.
