Amperity: First-Party Data at a Crossroads

In the summer of 2023, Amperity management was facing a critical decision on its future direction. Given the dramatic changes occurring within the digital advertising ecosystem, as concerns over consumer privacy placed limits on the ability to engage in third-party tracking, Amperity had to decide whether to pivot and develop a dedicated solution for advertisers based on first-party data. Such a pivot would require shifting resources from improving the company's core product, the customer data platform (CDP), which helped firms unify all their data sources and properly identify customers; as well as take targeted marketing actions mainly on their existing customers (i.e., development and retention efforts). A shift to serve digital advertising players not only had far reaching product development implications, but also strategic and go-to-market consequences. In particular, Amperity was considered a leader in the CDP category and a pivot could risk that position. Furthermore, the move would likely require changing the company's communications approach-who its salesforce targeted and how-and could imply partnering with digital ad agencies as well as ad platforms, like Meta and Google Ads. The monetization structure going forward also required careful consideration. Specifically, to date Amperity's pricing was contracted upfront and largely based on the number of customer profiles its CDP was expected to identify and the amount of data to be ingested. However, in the paid advertising domain, players typically took a percentage cut of the overall campaign spend. Not lost on Amperity co-founder and CTO Derek Slager's mind was that many clients, existing and prospective, were looking for concrete ways to leverage generative AI tools to improve their customer relationship management efforts.

• Business management
• Pricing strategy
• Marketing
• Digital marketing
• Technology adoption lifecycle
• AI and machine learning