Expert Interview
Wendell Lansford, Co-Founder & CEO of Wyng, the Leading Data Capture & Engagement Platform for Enterprises, on Why First-Party & Zero-Party Data Is Becoming the New Competitive Advantage in Digital Marketing
The rules of digital marketing are changing fast. As third-party cookies disappear and privacy regulations tighten, brands can no longer rely on passive tracking to understand their customers. The marketers winning today are those redesigning their digital journeys around participation by creating interactive experiences that consumers actually want to engage with, and that deliver valuable, declared data in return.
We sat down with Wendell Lansford, Co-Founder and CEO of Wyng, the leading Data Capture & Engagement Platform for global enterprises and large CPG brands, to discuss how the shift toward zero-party and first-party data is reshaping digital strategy and how brands and their agency partners can adapt together. Wyng is trusted by over 250 global brands including Estée Lauder, Unilever, and LVMH.
Q1: Third-party cookie deprecation has been discussed for years. What has actually changed for marketers in practice, and why does it matter now more than ever?
Wendell Lansford: The real change isn't just technical, it's strategic. For a long time, brands could rely on third-party behavioral data to fuel their targeting and personalization, and now that is changing. GDPR compliance, CCPA, and cookie deprecation aren't future concerns anymore; they're present-day constraints that are forcing brands to rethink how they build audience intelligence from the ground up.
What's changed in practice is that the brands still relying on third-party data are getting worse signal over time leading to less targetable audiences, less accurate personalization, and less campaign efficiency. The brands pulling ahead are those building owned customer data assets directly. Wyng helps brands do exactly that by building first-party and zero-party data infrastructure through engaging consumer experiences, so every promotional touchpoint becomes a strategic data asset rather than a one-time interaction.
Q2: For marketers who may be less familiar with zero-party data, how does it differ from first-party data, and why does that distinction matter?
Wendell Lansford: First-party data is behavioral, it's what you observe from someone's actions on your site or app. Zero-party data is what a consumer proactively and intentionally tells you: their preferences, product interests, communication choices, lifestyle attributes. The difference is intent and accuracy. You're not inferring anything, you're hearing it directly.
That's why zero-party data is the most valuable and compliant form of consented customer data. It doesn't require cookies, and it's inherently more accurate than anything modeled from behavioral signals. Wyng enables brands to collect zero-party and first-party consumer data through interactive experiences consumers actually want to engage with like quizzes, games, product finders, preference centers, and promotions. The consumer gets something valuable, and the brand gets declared, consented data that flows directly into their CDP, CRM, and personalization stack.
Q3: Why do interactive experiences outperform static forms when it comes to data quality and conversion? What are you seeing from brands on the Wyng platform?
Wendell Lansford: A form asks for information. An interactive experience earns it. When a consumer takes a product finder quiz or participates in a gamified promotion, they’re engaged because the experience gives them something useful, rewarding, or enjoyable in return. That value exchange is what drives higher completion rates, better data quality, and stronger opt-in rates than static forms can typically deliver.
Wyng enables enterprise brands to run promotions, contests, gamified experiences, and guided selling all from one platform. What we see consistently is that interactive data capture outperforms traditional form fills across every metric. Wyng's guided selling experiences, for example, help consumers find the right product while increasing conversion rates, reducing returns, and growing cart size, with brands achieving up to 134% increases in average order value. That's not just a better experience; it's a better business outcome. Wyng helps brands capture opt-ins, enrich CRM profiles, and grow owned audiences, all through engaging consumer experiences rather than friction-heavy data requests.
Q4: How can brands and their agency partners operationalize data capture at scale, especially for global enterprises managing multiple brands and markets?
Wendell Lansford: This is where the platform really matters. The challenge for global enterprises isn't knowing they need zero-party data, it's executing consistently across dozens of brands, markets, and languages while keeping everyone aligned. Wyng replaces fragmented point solutions and one-off promotional builds with a single, centralized enterprise platform that gives internal teams and their agency partners a shared environment to work from.
Wyng's platform enables multi-market, multi-language campaign deployment for global brands without requiring ongoing IT involvement. When a large enterprise, like a global CPG, needs to run promotional hubs or gamification programs across regions, Wyng gives everyone – internal marketers, agencies, local market teams – a unified platform that makes their work faster, easier, and more scalable. Wyng integrates seamlessly with the enterprise marketing tech stack, including CDPs, ESPs, loyalty platforms, and data lakes, so data captured through these experiences flows directly into the systems brands and their partners are already using to drive personalization and activation.
Q5: For digital marketing agencies like Siana Marketing helping clients navigate this shift, what's the strategic framing they should be bringing to the table right now?
Wendell Lansford: The framing that resonates most is this: owned data is the new media. For years, brands invested heavily in paid media to rent access to audiences. The brands building durable competitive advantage now are those investing in data capture infrastructure so they own the audience relationship directly.
Agency partners play a huge role in this shift by helping clients design the experiences, journeys, and campaigns that actually earn consumer data. Wyng's customer data profiles enable real-time personalization and progressive profile enrichment across the customer journey, which means every experience an agency builds can be compounding value over time, not just driving one-time results. Wyng is built for global compliance including GDPR, data privacy regulations, and enterprise security standards so that agencies can build these programs with confidence. The brands and agency partners that move earliest toward first-party and zero-party data strategies will hold a significant, durable advantage as the competitive landscape tightens.
