Ana Mourão, Global Customer CRM Senior Manager and CDP Advisor at Stanley Black & Decker, explains why the marketers who understand first-party data, governance, and clean rooms are the ones who end up with the most leverage.
Here’s something that surprised me. Ana Mourão has spent years building first-party data programs at Fortune 500 companies, and she says the biggest gap she runs into isn’t technology. It’s that a lot of marketers outside the martech world can’t clearly explain the difference between first-party, second-party, and third-party data, or why it should change how they work. That gap matters more than most people realize, because the marketers who close it end up holding most of the levers.
Ana joined Stanley Black & Decker about seven years ago to build the martech stack behind its end-user database. The challenge was a classic B2B2C one. Most people buy drills and saws through retailers and distributors, so the brand doesn’t naturally own the relationship. Her job was to build one. This was her second time on Deconstructing Data, and Jessie and I were glad to have her back.
What’s the difference between first-party, second-party, and third-party data?
Ana Mourão kept it simple, and I think it’s worth repeating exactly the way she framed it.
First-party data is the one that you collect with consent. Newsletter signups, any type of signup, any type of account creation, where there is the consent, preferably the explicit consent.
— Ana Mourão, Global Customer CRM Senior Manager and CDP Advisor, Stanley Black & Decker
First-party data includes attributes like name and email, plus behaviors captured through consented cookies: pages visited, emails clicked, apps downloaded. Second-party data is someone else’s first-party data that overlaps with yours. Her example was Walmart. If you sell through Walmart, you can match your aggregated data against theirs and activate on their properties without either side exposing raw customer records. Third-party data is collected across the web, often with consent buried in terms and conditions, then stitched together and sold as segments.
And she was clear that this isn’t about bashing third-party data.
I’m not here condemning. It’s not shade to whomever uses third-party data. I just want marketers to use it knowing of those differences and understanding what they mean to their work on a day-to-day basis.
— Ana Mourão, Global Customer CRM Senior Manager and CDP Advisor, Stanley Black & Decker
I agree with that. At BDEX, a lot of the companies that come to us are dealing with third-party data that’s breaking their process. They don’t know where it came from, how it was consented, or how the identity resolution was done. That’s the real risk.
Why does owning your data strategy matter for AI?
This was my favorite part of the conversation. Ana Mourão made a point about AI that I don’t hear often enough.
When you rent data, the data is not yours. Meaning that if you need to feed it to a model, you don’t know what’s in it. So the model may not perform as you expect it to.
— Ana Mourão, Global Customer CRM Senior Manager and CDP Advisor, Stanley Black & Decker
With your own first-party data, you know the recipe. You can see the deficiencies and fix them. With rented data, you’re crossing your fingers.
She also pushed hard on starting from use cases, not platforms. Pick a business objective, work backwards to the data you need, and run a proof of concept first. Her advice on choosing the pilot was sharp: pick something small but representative, and not too easy, so it actually kicks the tires on the whole strategy. When her team did this, they found process improvements nobody had mapped. They could go to market faster, test faster, and cut their dependence on some vendors.
That’s very much how I think too. I’m goal oriented. Before you collect anything, define why. Otherwise you either collect so much that nobody can use it, or you collect the wrong things entirely.
How does first-party data make marketers more valuable?
Here’s where the career angle comes in. Ana Mourão argues that marketers are the ones who know how data gets collected, which promotions drove signups, and which behaviors actually predict conversion. That knowledge is power, but only if marketers get involved in governance.
If you are involved in building that data governance, it gives the marketer way more power.
— Ana Mourão, Global Customer CRM Senior Manager and CDP Advisor, Stanley Black & Decker
Once the governance is in place, first-party data turns into what she called a growth loop.
You first collect, and then enrich, and then based on that enrichment you can improve the experience, and that generates more engagement, and then you’re collecting and enriching more, and it becomes a virtuous cycle of first-party data.
— Ana Mourão, Global Customer CRM Senior Manager and CDP Advisor, Stanley Black & Decker
That’s a big deal. It means first-party data is not a list you own. It’s a system that compounds, and the marketer who understands it becomes the person the whole organization leans on.
How do data clean rooms work, and why are they underused?
Ana Mourão thinks clean rooms are seriously underutilized, and plenty of marketers may already be using one through Amazon without realizing it. The clean room sits in the middle. It anonymizes your first-party data and your partner’s, then shows you the aggregated overlap. You might learn that 20% of your engaged audience, or 20% of the people who identify as construction workers, shop a particular product category on Amazon. Then you can activate there and run a control group to measure incrementality.
I won’t know at the personal level. But I will know that that chunk of my database has that overlap with that other database, and that already guides me.
— Ana Mourão, Global Customer CRM Senior Manager and CDP Advisor, Stanley Black & Decker
Where I see this going is AI. Clean rooms used to require analysts, charts, and a lot of patience. Now you can just ask your data a question in plain English. Ana pointed out the next step: AI decisioning tools that take an outcome and a set of creative assets and figure out the segmentation themselves. That frees marketers from the grunt work and lets them focus on strategy.
The bigger picture
Ana’s closing advice was simple. Mind your first-party data. Be careful about consent and privacy. Don’t collect data just to collect it. The fundamentals stay the same, and AI becomes a layer on top that makes everything easier to find and use.
I’d add one thing. We’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg on how AI will change marketing, and the people who win will be the ones who actually understand how it works. Nine times out of ten when someone tells me ChatGPT gave them a bad answer, it’s because the prompt had no context. Tell it who you are, what you’re trying to do, and why. It’s the same principle as first-party data, really. The quality of what you get out depends on how well you understand what you’re putting in.
Connect with Ana Mourão: Explore her Experimental Marketer Framework at experimentalmarketer.com, visit anamourao.ai, read her columns at MarTech, or connect with her on LinkedIn.
Ready to put your first-party data to work? BDEX helps companies enrich and activate their customer data with verified identity resolution. Visit bdex.com and click “Talk to an Expert.”
Watch the full episode: Why First-Party Data Is Your Career’s Secret Weapon in Marketing on YouTube
This article was adapted from an episode of Deconstructing Data, BDEX’s weekly podcast on data-driven marketing. Tune in live every Thursday at 4:15 PM Eastern on LinkedIn.
About BDEX: For companies that need clean identity data to power their products, BDEX offers unmatched quality and execution. Visit bdex.com and click “Talk to an Expert” to get started.
