Zero-Party Data: How arts organizations win in a privacy-first world

We’re living through the biggest data shift in 20 years, and it's forcing a reckoning for arts leaders: know your audience deeply, or lose them to organizations that do.

It all started in 2021 when Apple blocked cross-app tracking. Overnight, the fuel of the digital advertising ecosystem began to evaporate:

Third-party data?
Disappearing.
Cookies are dying, and privacy regulations are tightening.

Second-party data?
List-sharing creates a false sense of demand. It recycles the same small group of high-frequency attendees.
It doesn’t expand your market—it fatigues it.

First-party data?
Helpful, but limited. It tells you what people did…not why they did it. It describes their profile—but it can’t predict their future behavior.

Are we screwed? No.
Despite all the noise about privacy, people want to be known—on their own terms.

💬 74% of consumers will share personal info with brands they trust.
💬 57% will share it in exchange for personalization.

They’re not saying “don’t know me.”
They’re saying “Know me better. Stop sending noise. If you’re going to speak to me, speak like you actually see me.”

And there IS a way to do that.

Zero-party data.
This is the data people CHOOSE to share with you—and it’s GOLD for personalization.

It’s what McKinsey pointed to fifteen years ago when they said need-based segmentation is the strongest predictor of behavior.

In today’s landscape, zero-party data is just more accurate than demographic or behavioral guesswork—it’s the only category of data people actively want to give you.

The REAL challenge is that most organizations don’t have the infrastructure to operationalize it.

Until now.

Ready to build the zero-party data infrastructure that actually moves the needle? Join my webinar to see the framework that turns trust into behavior change