Zero-party data walked up to me after my talk

What I didn't expect to learn at OMR Festival

A CEO approached me after my talk in Hamburg last week.

"What you said about zero-party data — we built a company around that idea."

That's how my evening turned into a dinner I hadn't planned. And one I'm glad I went to.

I was at OMR Festival. 10,000 marketers, an expo hall worth the trip on its own, big names all over the place (Tom Brady, Heidi Klum, Scott Galloway, to name a few).

My talk was on first-party data as a service offering (an extension of the agency blueprint we covered back in January).

Near the end, I briefly mentioned zero-party data as something worth watching.

One mention was all it took to set up a fun dinner party with a CEO.

So what is zero-party data, exactly?

First-party data is what your tools collect for you. Visits, clicks, conversions. Behavior captured through analytics, pixels, and platform events.

Zero-party data skips the inference entirely. The person just tells you directly.

Think: a quiz that helps someone find the right product, an onboarding form that asks about goals, a preference survey before you email them. You know what they want because they said so.

It's not a brand new concept, but it's becoming more relevant. As cookies continue to disappear and privacy expectations shift, the data people voluntarily hand you becomes more valuable. And more trustworthy.

The use cases that came up over dinner were interesting. Especially for e-commerce.

Stated preference beats inferred behavior almost every time. Same logic applies to email segmentation: you send based on what someone told you, not what you guessed about them.

I'm still getting familiar with this space and don't have strong takes on specific platforms yet. But the concept is worth having in your vocabulary. And the fact that one mention in a conference talk created a relationship with a company built around it tells me the market is paying attention.

If you've worked with zero-party data, as a strategy or through a specific tool, hit reply. I'd genuinely love to hear what you've seen.

To Your Measured Success!

–Jeff Sauer
CEO of MeasureU

P.S. MeasureSummit 2026 (May edition) starts tomorrow. And the ticket is free. Grab your spot at measuresummit.com. Hope to see you there.

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