News and Analysis
Marketers Struggle to Balance Personalization and Privacy
While consumers are increasingly coming to expect personalization in their inboxes, too much personalization can damage trust and steer customers away. Nobody wants to feel like they’re being watched, but recent surveys show consumers are also growing increasingly frustrated with marketing materials that aren’t targeted enough.
Oomiji Helps Brands “Build Their Own Walled Gardens” of Customer Data
Zero-party data, or information customers willingly provide about themselves, is gaining popularity as a way of amassing customer data at a time when privacy restrictions are making that more difficult. The platform Oomiji is betting on that trend, differentiating itself from other CDPs by helping its clients ask their customers for data (instead of relying on AI to extrapolate limited data to probabilistic segments and preferences).
Commentary
From Personal To Individual: Why Engaging Unique Consumers Requires Unique Communication
People everywhere receive “personalized” emails daily from brands greeting them by their first names. For a long time, brands have assumed this conveys genuine care for each customer. It’s certainly not the case anymore. Technology has evolved, and consumer expectations have risen to such a level that marketers must do much more. It’s no longer about saying, “We know you,” but rather, “We understand you.” To do this requires a major shift from personalization to individualization.
It may sound relatively straightforward, but what this shift entails and how companies can incorporate individualization in their everyday communications presents a whole new set of challenges.
The Art of Making a Retail Holiday
From Black Friday and Cyber Monday to back-to-school sales, retail holidays may be arbitrary, but they have become a core component of successful sales and marketing strategies. As a result of their success, these holidays are becoming expected, fixtures of the retail industry embedded in its collective psyche. Companies must innovate to keep them fresh. Brands need to monitor competitors to see what works and what doesn’t work and tweak their strategies appropriately.
Data on successful “holiday” campaigns reveal how to make the most of holidays, whether long-established or freshly innovated.
Facebook, Free Speech, and the Responsibility of Power
The many arguments adduced to spare Facebook the responsibility of monitoring its content, of removing content that leads to physical violence all the way down to false political advertising, fail because they are based on under-developed understandings of responsibility itself. To argue that Facebook should be spared almost all regulatory expectations because it is a technology like the telephone rather than a media site like the New York Times or that Facebook should not be entrusted with taking down false advertising or striking down violent speech because those are tasks best left to the government is a failure of imagination and a failure to imagine what (civic) responsibility entails. As the word suggests (respons-ibility), the responsibility of any company or person who provides the possibility of speech, who can take it away from any given user and makes billions in profits off it, is to answer for and consider the admittedly unpredictable and deeply complex ramifications of the speech spoken under the company’s or person’s auspices.
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Street Fight Daily: Foursquare’s Machine Learning-Based Attribution, Duopoly’s Damage Control
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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Listen Up! Voice Makes Itself Heard in Delivery of Local News… As Grocery Shopping Evolves, Supermarkets Partner with Meal Kit Services… Apple’s App Store Privacy Crackdown May Hurt Facebook’s Onavo…
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