“First-party data” has been a conference-stage buzzword for five years. But in 2026, the talking is mostly over. The biggest brands in the world have quietly rebuilt their marketing around data they collect themselves — and the results are showing up in earnings reports, not just keynote slides.
Here’s what five major brands are actually doing with first-party data right now, with numbers from public filings and press releases. Then we’ll get to the part most articles skip: what any of this means if you don’t have a loyalty app with 200 million users.
McDonald’s: Loyalty as a First-Party Data Engine
McDonald’s ended 2025 with nearly 210 million 90-day active loyalty users across 70 markets, per its Q4 2025 earnings release. Systemwide sales to loyalty members hit nearly $37 billion for the year — up 20%. The company’s stated target is 250 million active loyalty users by the end of 2027.
Why pour that much into an app for a company that sells burgers? Frequency. On a 2025 earnings call, CEO Chris Kempczinski said non-loyalty U.S. customers visit about 10.5 times a year, while loyalty members average roughly 26 visits.
That gap is the whole case for first-party data in one stat: known customers you can reach directly are worth more than double anonymous ones.
Every order through the app is a signal — what you buy, when, how often, which offers move you. McDonald’s uses that to personalize offers and pricing at a level no third-party audience segment could touch.
Disney: Turning Viewer Data Into an Ad Product
Disney isn’t just using first-party data for its own marketing. It packaged the data itself into a product for advertisers. In January 2025, Disney announced Disney Compass, a platform that lets brands activate against Disney’s first-party viewing data across planning, buying, and measurement — with integrations into LiveRamp, Snowflake, and VideoAmp.
It also rolled out the Disney Select AI Engine, which builds custom lookalike audiences inside Disney’s clean room, and expanded its Audience Graph to every global market where Disney+ operates.
The lesson isn’t “build a streaming service.” It’s that Disney treats audience data as an asset with its own P&L. Most companies still treat theirs as exhaust.
The New York Times: Replacing Cookies With Its Own Signals
The Times started building its first-party targeting suite back in 2019, when it saw cookie deprecation coming. Today it targets ads using its own behavioral and contextual signals — including BrandMatch, a GenAI tool that builds audience segments from article readership matched to a campaign brief. The Times claims this drives ad engagement well above IAB benchmarks (their number, so treat it as a vendor claim).
More interesting is what they’re doing with clean rooms. In a collaboration with a major international bank via Decentriq, the two matched their customer lists in a privacy-safe environment and found that 25% of the bank’s customers were Times readers. No cookies, no data leaving either side — just two first-party datasets proving audience overlap before a dollar was spent.
Tesco: 82% of Sales Flowing Through a Loyalty Card
UK grocery giant Tesco might be the most complete example. According to eMarketer’s June 2026 analysis, about 82% of Tesco’s UK sales flow through its Clubcard loyalty program. Members get exclusive lower prices; Tesco gets transaction-level purchase data on nearly its entire customer base.
That data feeds a retail media network — ads across in-store screens, digital shelves, and scan-as-you-shop devices — whose profits help fund the member discounts that keep the data flowing. It’s a flywheel: discounts drive data, data drives ad revenue, ad revenue funds discounts.
Sephora: Loyalty Members as 80% of Revenue
Sephora’s Beauty Insider program reportedly drives around 80% of the company’s annual sales across roughly 34 million members, per industry coverage. The program works because the data goes both ways: purchase history and browsing behavior feed product recommendations, restock reminders, and tiered perks that give members a reason to keep identifying themselves at every touchpoint.
What This Means If You’re Not McDonald’s
Notice the pattern across all five: none of them are buying third-party audience segments and hoping. They’re collecting identity and behavior directly, then acting on it. But every one of these programs took years and nine-figure budgets to build.
Here’s the uncomfortable math for everyone else. These brands earn first-party data because customers log in — to order, to stream, to check out. If you run a typical business website, most of your visitors never identify themselves at all.
They read, they compare, they leave. You paid to get them there, and you have no idea who they were.
So the practical playbook for a mid-sized company looks less like “build a loyalty app” and more like this:
- Capture identity earlier. Email capture, gated tools, and account creation all turn anonymous traffic into first-party records. So does visitor identification, which resolves a portion of your anonymous traffic to real, contactable profiles without waiting for a form fill.
- Act on behavior, not just identity. McDonald’s doesn’t send everyone the same offer. Track what pages people visit and how recently, then sequence your email and retargeting to match. Recency matters more than most marketers think.
- Enrich what you capture. An email address alone is thin. Appending firmographic and behavioral attributes turns a contact into a profile you can actually segment. We covered which fields matter in our guide to customer profile enrichment.
- Close the loop. Tesco’s flywheel works because the data feeds back into pricing and media decisions. Whatever you collect, wire it into your ad platforms and CRM so it changes what you do next week — not just what’s in a dashboard.
First-party data stopped being a trend the moment it started showing up in SEC filings. The brands above aren’t experimenting anymore. The only open question is how long everyone else keeps renting audiences instead of building their own.
