Data & identity · also called 1P data
First-party data
First-party data is information a company collects directly from its own customers or audience, such as purchases, sign-ups, app use and site behaviour, through its own channels.
First-party data comes straight from the relationship between a business and the people who use it: a retailer's purchase history, a publisher's registered readers, an airline's loyalty members, an app's usage logs. Nobody else collected it and passed it on.
It has become the most prized data in advertising for three reasons: it tends to be accurate, it is less affected by browser and device restrictions such as App Tracking Transparency and third-party cookie blocking, and privacy laws generally make it easier to justify when collected transparently with a clear purpose. Advertisers use it for targeting their own customers, building lookalike audiences, measurement via conversions APIs and collaboration in data clean rooms. Publishers use it to build seller-defined audiences and authenticated IDs. Retail media is essentially the monetisation of retailers' first-party data.
"First-party" does not mean "no rules". Consent, notices, purpose limitation and data minimization still apply under laws like GDPR, CCPA / CPRA and India's India DPDP Act. It also sits alongside zero-party data, second-party data and third-party data.
Think of it like this
First-party data is like a shopkeeper's own notebook of regular customers, as opposed to a list bought from someone else.
An example
A grocery chain in Chile has purchase histories for 4 million loyalty members. It uses them to target nappy offers to recent baby-product buyers and to sell targeted ad space to consumer brands.
Related terms
Zero-party data
Zero-party data is information a customer intentionally and proactively gives a brand, such as preferences, intentions or quiz answers, rather than data inferred from their behaviour.
Second-party data
Second-party data is another company's first-party data shared directly with you through a partnership, such as an airline sharing audience insights with a hotel chain.
Third-party data
Third-party data is information about people collected by companies with no direct relationship to them, then aggregated and sold or licensed to advertisers, often as ready-made audience segments.
Data clean room
A data clean room is a secure environment where companies combine and analyse their customer data together, getting aggregated insights or audiences without exposing each other's raw personal data.
CDP (customer data platform)
A CDP (customer data platform) is software that collects a company's first-party customer data from many sources, unifies it into individual profiles and makes those profiles available to marketing tools.
Retail media
Retail media is advertising sold by retailers, on their own websites, apps and stores or elsewhere using their shopper data, letting brands reach customers close to the point of purchase.
Sources: GDPR Article 5: principles, California Attorney General: CCPA