As Cookies Crumble, Can Location Data Pick Up the Pieces?

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One potential and promising alternative to third-party cookies is location data. Captured from mobile users as they move through the physical world, location data can be used for a range of purposes and personalization.

Real-world visitation patterns offer clues to user identity, brand affinities, and purchase intent. Putting aside that Covid-19 has radically upended movement patterns for the time being, regular airport or hotel visitation can identify business travelers, routine presence in a gym suggests health-consciousness, and weekly fast-food visits implies the opposite. Someone visiting car dealerships is probably an “auto-intender,” and so on.

mobile data

Data Trends for 2021: Overcoming Digital Ad Uncertainty

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With privacy regulations on the horizon, email is a known and comfortable identifier that many consumers self-register and that brands can anonymize in a digital environment with hashed emails for privacy compliance. 

While 2020 has thrown a lot of curve balls, marketers that worked to get their consumer data house in order with an eye on ways to better enable their first-party data for a complete view of their most-desired audiences and buying behaviors will survive and thrive as we head into 2021. The newest technology, data-sharing innovations, and identity resolution algorithms won’t help if you don’t have the basics down.

Covid-19 Will Make the Workplace a Privacy Hotspot

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More than a third of the 2,600 respondents in the survey said they want no relaxation of privacy laws due to the pandemic, 43% don’t want employers conducting medical checks and requesting health information, and nearly two-thirds don’t support disclosing information about infected individuals. While everyone wants to get back to business as usual, employers need to be careful that their efforts to monitor the health of employees and prevent the spread of the virus remain respectful of employee privacy and aren’t intrusive. 

Ad Tech and Privacy

What First-Party Data Can and Can’t Do For Agencies

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Make no mistake, first-party data will play a critical role in the future of marketing, as it always has. But agencies as trusted advisors, and the industry overall, need to be realistic about what first-party data can and can’t do for clients, especially in the face of a global pandemic that has upended everything we thought we knew about consumer behavior.

Foursquare’s New Audio Assistant is a Peek into the Future of Local Tech

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Dubbed Marsbot for Airpods, Foursquare’s virtual assistant will whisper insights to users about their surroundings, unprompted, as they move throughout the world. This may be a recommendation for a local coffee shop or a fun fact about a landmark.

For brick-and-mortar businesses and the technology providers that help them connect with customers, the marketing possibilities are tantalizing.

CCPA’s Impact: Businesses Prepare for Fall Surge in Data Subject Requests

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In a customer set with more than 16 million consumer records — with consumer records being defined as a single, individual record associated with a unique email address within a database — DataGrail found that people are largely taking action to control their privacy by exercising rights provided by the CCPA.

Consumers opt-out of their personal information being sold “most” of the time, and deletion requests make up 31% of all data subject requests. Twenty-one percent of consumers have accessed their data thanks to the new regulations.

Why Contextual Ads Are Generating More Interest

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Increased attention to consumer privacy is shifting the way advertisers do business. One of these shifts is the increased embrace of contextual advertising, which shows Internet users ads based on the content of the sites they’re searching, not based on their previous digital activity.

I checked in with John Clavadetscher, president and chief commercial officer at Cooler Screens, for more on why brands are taking up contextual ads and what benefits the format offers.

iOS14 and Privacy: What it Means for Advertisers, Especially on Facebook

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The latest in the tug of war between consumer privacy and effective digital advertising pits Apple against Facebook, Google, and others. At stake for ad tech: significant revenue for ad publishers and app developers, effective ad results for advertisers, and more relevant ads for consumers. At stake for users: consumer privacy protection, the use of their behavioral data for marketing, and possibly, the future of “free” software.

Apple’s pending release of iOS 14 is a strong consumer-privacy-first stance and a potential disruption to digital marketing as we know it. But what is the real impact for targeted digital advertising?

Ad Tech and Privacy

When It Comes to Winning Over Customers, Transparency Always Wins

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Based on recent studies, people crave privacy, especially when it comes to their data. Repeatedly seeing an ad for a pair of shoes you glanced at once online but didn’t buy doesn’t create a warm or trusting feeling of being cared for by a retailer – for many people, it may come across as creepy. There is a way to gain back that trust, and it is all connected to transparency or, to be precise, web transparency. 

New Study Shows the Impact of Transparency on Consumer Trust

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It’s time to start proactively addressing consumer privacy concerns. The data shows that people are becoming more concerned about privacy, and all signs point to the continuation of this trend.  

Start with building trust through simple actions like better communication and user experiences. Bake consumer trust initiatives into your corporate strategy by investing in technology, creating formal KPIs, and educating your internal audiences and stakeholders about its importance.

Blocking Third-Party Cookies Will Not Mean the End of Marketing Attribution

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The demise of third-party cookies will not mean the end of digital advertising and the ability to assign proper attribution to individuals engaging in various touchpoints along the buyer journey. Several entities are currently hashing out other methodologies brands can leverage to retrieve audience analytics.

Marketing attribution providers will continue to provide reliable data to enterprise marketers on consumers and their customer journeys through the sales funnel. Attribution providers worth their salt will not only make sure they are compliant with the tightened rules around cookies but also ensure their clients are following the letter of the law.

Ad Tech and Privacy

California Attorney General Targets “Low-Hanging Fruit” for CCPA Non-Compliance

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The California Consumer Privacy Act enforcement period began July 1, and two months later, numerous firms have received letters from the attorney general’s office about noncompliance. Multiple major companies, including Walmart, Sephora, and Ring, have been hit with class-action lawsuits.

But there’s no great mystery or nefarious agenda tied to the companies that have been targeted as this point, says Dan Clarke, president at IntraEdge. To avoid meeting the same fate, companies need to adhere to the fundamentals of the nation’s first major statewide privacy law. Clarke spoke with Street Fight to explain.

Who’s Afraid of CCPA? Steps Toward Ethical Data Collection

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The marketing and advertising communities are inherently about data collection. They survey and track people’s online behaviors to uncover a deeper understanding of trending sentiments. Through this, the ultimate goal is to help marketers better target the right audiences with messaging that will resonate with them on the platforms they typically frequent. 

While data privacy should be a given considering how central it is to the industries at hand, it’s often still seen as a challenge to overcome. So, where is the problem?

A More Granular Look at What Kinds of Data Consumers Are Happy to Disclose

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Despite all the understandably scary headlines about the risks of data collection, plenty of consumers are still willing to provide personal information to brands. The catch? They need something in return, and the type of advertising as well as the type of data on which it’s based are crucial to securing consumer trust.

App Data, Privacy, and the IDFA Armageddon: Industry Leaders’ Takes

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As an industry, we must embrace the new rules of iOS14 and create a sustainable future for both app developers and advertisers. I believe we can all agree that user consent is important for any app that monetizes through advertising. Also, there are options to provide user-level attribution and necessary data for performance advertising within Apple’s acceptable framework. I’d encourage all publishers to talk to Apple and seek clarification on process and end-user consent along with the use of IDFVs & SKAdNetwork product road map, etc. 

I expect that publishers will aggressively move to optimize their sign-up funnels to maximize consent or live with campaign-only-level metrics and lose end-user targeting. If you’d like to continue to optimize towards ROAS, we encourage you to think of privacy consent as a step in the UA conversion funnel necessary to show targeted ads to consumers.

Tracing, Tracking, and Trust: Why Tech Is on the Sidelines in Contact Tracing

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Mainly, multiple instances of data breaches committed by governments, corporations, platforms, and even data warehouses have eroded the trust citizens have when forking over sensitive and personal information. The resistance only increases as a result of Americans’ strong resistance to being told what to do, which manifested in widespread protests against mandatory quarantine restrictions in several states.    

How can this resistance be overcome? Companies and government organizations asking for personal information must build trust from the very beginning. High rates of consent require clear information to users about exactly what data citizens will share and how this data will be used and protected.

Ad Tech and Privacy

Why You Need to Build a Data Governance Team Right Now

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In today’s climate in which consumer and regulatory expectations change so quickly, data governance is increasingly becoming a necessary function for all businesses leveraging consumer data.

GDPR, CCPA, and future state and federal privacy laws force brands, agencies, tech vendors, and data providers to either comply or face fines and other legal action. Without a data governance team to operationalize and manage their consumer data assets, they put themselves at extreme risk of losing competitive advantage or of being put out of business altogether.

The Problems with a Band-Aid Approach to Data Governance and Compliance

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As more privacy laws pop up, blanket policies and compliance band aids could result in brands cutting away 20% to 40% of the data they would have previously collected. A big portion of that data is likely usable in different scenarios, but a failure to operate at the edge means that brands are cutting away portions to be on the safe side.

Rather than jettison huge chunks of data because it may not be compliant, the industry needs to adopt granular data governance controls that provide a view into the circumstances of every piece of data.

Pay to Get Rid of Ads on Social Media? Consumers Say Maybe, Maybe Not

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Nearly 60% of respondents overall said they’d be at least somewhat willing to pay for social media, and that figure could likely climb if a small monthly subscription fee were added. Twingate contends that Facebook/Instagram would only need to charge users $2.07/month, and Twitter $1.61/month, to earn via subscription fees what they earn via ad revenue. Respondents said they would pay $5.24 and $4.75/month, respectively.

But inertia and apathy are strong, money is even tighter outside the US market, and surveillance advertising, and the size of its audience, are the X-factors that catapulted Facebook to the top of the global corporate order. I’d bet Google, Facebook, and, increasingly, Amazon, will be slow to give up the surveillance revenues and walled-garden ecosystems that have made them this century’s most powerful corporate actors.

Marketers, Give the People What They Want: Control

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There’s a reason ad blocking exists — because many ads aren’t very good, and because consumers rarely get to choose the ads to which they’re exposed to If we change that dynamic by putting the power in their hands, there’s a huge fringe benefit: Ad recall and favorability go up. And if the consumer chooses your ad specifically, favorability and ad recall surge even higher. Why? Because they own the experience and have control. We’re talking stickiness, something every brand wants for their advertising.