Data collaboration in the digital world: How retail media networks benefit from collaboration

According to a 2024 study, commissioned by LiveRamp and conducted by Forrester Consulting, 93% of enterprises agree data collaboration is critical to driving revenue growth.

In a digital landscape defined by rising privacy expectations and the decline of third-party identifiers, data collaboration is becoming essential for accelerating marketing performance and unlocking new commercial opportunities. For retail media networks (RMNs) increasingly seeking to monetise their customer data across offsite channels, collaboration enables far greater reach, precision, and value.

Why collaborate?

All too frequently, customer data is siloed, making accessing, connecting, and acting on data difficult, resulting in incomplete customer views and consequently, disjointed experiences, missed opportunities, and reactive marketing.

But when brands collaborate, both internally and externally, with partners, platforms, and even competitors, they gain a more holistic view of how customers move through their journey by connecting data in new ways. This allows them to elevate their advertising efforts and make the right offers at the right place and time, unlocking new revenue streams across the business. For RMNs in particular, collaboration ensures that their rich shopper datasets can perform across paid social, programmatic, and connected TV environments, driving stronger advertiser outcomes and increasing the profitability of their media offering.

It’s crucial, though, that the right partners and technology are in place to scale results in a privacy-centric way. By securely combining customer datasets with trusted partners, RMNs and advertisers can improve audience targeting, attribution, and campaign personalisation without compromising consumer privacy.

Increasing reach with identity resolution

A powerful identity (ID) graph is central to achieving meaningful impact from data collaboration. Acting as the connective layer between disparate datasets, an ID graph resolves identifiers from multiple sources, such as hashed emails, device IDs, cookies, and login signals, into accurate, privacy-safe consumer profiles.

For RMNs that often struggle to reach their own customers on the open web, the ID graph dramatically expands addressability by matching retailer first party data against a much broader universe of UK consumers. This improves offsite activation scale, strengthens frequency and reach controls, and provides a clearer understanding of cross-channel customer journeys. Ultimately, the ID graph increases the commercial value of a RMN’s audiences by making them more findable, targetable, and measurable across all major digital channels.

Sagacity’s Smart Link connects individuals across databases to verify their identity and validate data within an ID graph. It is available on the LiveRamp, InfoSum and Databricks data collaboration platforms, providing brands and publishers with the ability to increase match rates, boosting the reach of existing media channel advertising campaigns and bridging the gap between online and offline data.

Attracting new advertisers with additional consumer attributes

The value of data collaboration becomes even greater when the data partner not only provides an ID graph and clean room infrastructure but can also append additional attributes in order to attract new advertisers not in their specific sectors. Enhancing existing customer data with lifestyle, geo-demographic, and interest-based attributes creates a transformative opportunity for both advertisers and RMNs.

For advertisers, these additional attributes enhance their existing first-party data, enabling deeper segmentation, more accurate modelling, and far more personalised communications. For retail media networks, the benefits are even more significant: enriched insight expands the commercial viability of their audience offering beyond their core retail category.

For example, a supermarket RMN can append financial behaviours, motoring interests, or home ownership attributes to its base. This allows it to attract entirely new categories of advertisers, such as financial services, insurance, automotive, or travel, who would otherwise see no natural relevance in supermarket purchase data alone.

Without this enrichment layer, RMNs remain limited to their native category and miss substantial new revenue streams. With it, they become true multi-sector media platforms capable of delivering high-value audiences to a much wider range of brands.
Sagacity’s Enhance consumer data has more than 300 lifestyle, geo-demographic, and interest-based attributes, and is also available via LiveRamp, InfoSum and Databricks, enabling advertisers to discover and activate high value audiences at scale. It enables RMNs to build campaigns with unprecedented precision, activating audiences across channels including social, display and connected TV, without compromising compliance or control.

Protect privacy with clean rooms

Clean rooms provide the secure and privacy-preserving foundation that makes all of this possible. Within a clean room, data from retailers, advertisers, and the data partner can be matched, analysed, and activated without ever exposing raw consumer information. All processing happens in a controlled, encrypted environment that adheres to strict governance standards and regulatory requirements such as GDPR.

This protects consumer trust, safeguards commercial IP, and reassures advertisers that the audiences they are buying are compliant, accurate, and ethically sourced. Clean rooms also future-proof RMNs against industry shifts, from cookie deprecation to tightening global privacy regulation.

Creating a shared engine for growth

Combining identity graphs, enriched consumer attributes, and secure clean room infrastructure creates a powerful ecosystem for scalable, compliant data collaboration.

Retail media networks gain increased offsite reach, access to new advertiser categories, and the ability to offer richer, more attractive audience products. Advertisers benefit from more precise targeting, enhanced insight, and stronger performance across digital channels. And because all collaboration takes place in a privacy-safe environment, both sides maintain the highest levels of data security and consumer trust.

This approach transforms data from a siloed asset into a shared engine for growth: unlocking new revenue, stronger partnerships, and improved marketing outcomes across the entire digital ecosystem.