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Brands can do several things to enhance a personalized omnichannel experience without having to sacrifice data privacy. First and foremost is to keep customer data, especially PII and other sensitive data, within an organization’s own security perimeter — whether that’s on-premises or in the cloud. This is a basic if often misunderstood tenet. There’s a misconception that SaaS companies can offer indemnity for data loss, but indemnification does not pay for the loss of brand reputation or trust. The bottom line is that data is always at risk when it leaves a company’s perimeter, full stop. If you want maximum control, you don’t let it out of your security perimeter.
Beyond this, however, is bringing advanced levels of security into customer data. This is crucial, especially with the consumer’s web experience rapidly becoming the primary interaction with a brand. Exposing personal data to a website necessarily brings it closer to the edge of the security perimeter, increasing the risk of exposure and misuse. Homomorphic encryption minimizes the risk by essentially never de-crypting the data — even when in use.
In 2020, the new focus for brands is gaining a real, direct relationship with audiences.
If they don’t already have those records, they need to gather them – and that’s going to mean providing attractive value in return for signals like email addresses. Some are coming to call this voluntarily-supplied information “zero-party” data.
“You really want to personalise and make those experiences most relevant for consumers,” Sandra Swindle, SVP, CRM Technology Delivery Lead at Merkle says. “But, in order, to do that brands need that data back.
“And so, giving an exchange of value for that data, is something that a lot of brands are working on right now in order to keep that consumer profile or understand how to make their products work for consumers and drive what consumers are looking for. Tomorrow is going to continue to be relevant as we move into this compliance era.”
One of the most valuable aspects of first-party data is exclusivity – it’s the data you collect and control. It’s also the data you create and grow yourself. Put another way, it’s the produce you grow in your garden.
It’s not second-party data that you get from partners, which is like buying produce directly from someone else’s farm. And it’s not third-party data that is aggregated from data vendors or brokers, which is like buying produce from a grocery store. Any of your competitors can buy this come-one-come-all data, so it doesn’t provide a data advantage.
Marketers who are committed to being transparent, compliant and building trust with consumers can no longer rely solely on data providers for rich sources of consumer data. That means marketers must begin to sow the right seeds, nurture and harvest their own gardens of first-party consumer data to avoid being confined to the same sources used by their competitors.
Welcome to a workspace specially created for enterprise marketing teams looking to assess and increase the maturity of their marketing operations on a map.
CabinetM today announced the launch of LibraryM, a martech resource website. The initial iteration comprises a series of directories listing, among other things, news sources, experts, thought-leaders and communities, career information and further reading. It also lists martech directories where vendors can claim and manage their profiles, including some which are arguably CabinetM competitors like G2 and TrustRadius.
A new study by Aroscop and Brand Equity that polled over 450 marketers, advertisers, publishers, and technology providers, found that brands are yet to truly embrace a cookieless future. This is further evidenced by the fact that only 22% of the respondents believe that a cookieless future may have a severe impact on brand building.
Most respondents said that techniques like frequency capping, personalization, behavioral targeting, and retargeting would experience the brunt of the shift to cookieless marketing. However, the study found that only 8% of the respondents have deployed alternate solutions to prepare for the shift. 35% of respondents stated that they are actively looking out for solutions better adapted for cookieless marketing.
Among the brands, only 13% are actively leveraging their first-party data, while 64% plan to do so in the next six months. The study also revealed that 66% of agencies believe that their clients will deploy first-party data to create better advertising campaigns in the next six months. Similarly, 67% of publishers are also expected to embrace first-party data to drive better advertising outcomes.
The world's leading provider of indexes for financial markets is preparing to launch a new one that will help investors track the performance of crypto assets such as bitcoin.
S&P Dow Jones Indices is teaming up with the crypto data company Lukka to create an index providing pricing information on a group of crypto assets. S&P will provide the branding of the index, while Lukka will handle the data.
The economic shockwaves and fundamental shifts in consumer behavior caused by the COVID-19 pandemic have brought new urgency to transformation mandates and growth-focused initiatives that not only create new revenue opportunities and improve customer interaction and engagement, but also open up new avenues for collecting valuable first-party customer data that can be wielded as a competitive advantage when unified and acted on quickly. While these initiatives will vary significantly by industry and other business-specific context, here’s a look at five common themes that will drive customer engagement and value-based growth in 2021 and beyond.
1. Direct-to-Consumer Diversification
2. Customer Lifecycle Marketing
3. Digital Products and Experiences
4. Audience Monetization
5. Analytics and Data Science Democratization
The conclusions formed by the report are: - Brand Trust Means Better Signal. In all markets, increasing education about data led to increased brand trust and willingness to share information.
- Privacy Personalized. Consumer awareness and concern about data collection, as well as their understanding of the connection between their data and value for companies, is in a secular uptrend.
- Informed Consent Emerges. As the economy becomes increasingly digitally driven, policymakers should recognize the benefits of an informed citizenry when it comes to data collection.
- As of 2019, research had it that an average of 51% of companies uses marketing automation.
- An increase in ROI and conversions were noticed by at least 77% of business owners
- According to 64% of marketers, email automation is the most popular form of market automation. 21% of email marketing revenue goes to automated email campaigns.
- According to SharpSpring’s investor presentation, the marketing automation software industry which is worth $6.1 billion will double in 3 years.
- 82% of B2B and B2C companies employ the use of marketing automation software.
- 63% of companies outsource part or all of their marketing automation strategy planning. There are many companies that lack the technical know-how of automation tools that outsource all the planning to professionals.
Typically retail media networks pitch advertisers on access to first-party data (usually through a loyalty program) as well as the ability to close the loop on measurement and attribution if an ad converted to a sale. Aside from ads on the retailers’ digital properties, there’s also usually the ability to advertise in the retailers’ email or on its social channels. That the newer retail media networks’ offerings are so similar, it can be difficult for advertisers to figure out which retail media network to prioritize.
“How do you decide how much money to give to Walgreens or CVS [or the other retail media networks]?” said Elizabeth Marsten, senior director of marketplace strategic services at marketing agency Tinuti. “Everyone is asking brands for money. Who gets it and how much? In the end, how do I look at it all? That’s the question brands are asking. Nobody knows the answer right now. Whoever sells it first is the winner.”
As retail media has become more crowded, the business-to-business marketing from retailers pitching advertisers on retail media networks has become more aggressive and that’s “increased client inquiries” for those networks, noted Barnes. At the same time, the brands interested in retail media have expanded beyond the CPG bread and butter as the “pool of brands that can’t ignore retail media is rapidly circling out further and further.”
When consumers visit and engage with content on a publisher’s properties they are establishing and consenting to a first-party relationship with that publisher. First-party publisher device graphs also happen to be the most effective mechanism for attributing conversions, and they don’t require any cookie syncing or sharing identity with third parties. It is what publishers have always done, attribution measurement on their own inventory.
his creates a new challenge for advertisers, who must find a new and privacy-centric solution to the third party cookie, which also allows them to target consumers effectively. However, one of these solutions is easy to implement, and it focuses on live intent combined with advanced on-page entity analysis – a rocket-fuelled form of contextual targeting, if you will.
This relies on targeting consumers in the ‘live intent’ stage – the exact moment that they have searched for something that has brought them to a publisher’s page. Live intent overlaid with deciphering the meaning of the page allows advertisers to more accurately understand the reason behind a person viewing a particular page and what they could be looking at to help them serve the most relevant ad in that moment. This kind of contextual targeting is an efficient and effective means to reach consumers, with data from Integral Ad Science showing that 80% of UK consumers like to see ads that match the content they are viewing, with 70% more likely to remember a contextually relevant ad. What’s more this solution is privacy-first and does not rely on any storage of data, identifiers or tracking across the web.
Most enterprise companies do not use customer journey maps, but more than half are building them or plan to build and use them in the future, this research study finds.
The widespread creation and rollout of digital currencies is “absolutely inevitable” as the international payments system rapidly evolves, according to the CEO of Standard Chartered. “I think there is absolutely a role for central bank digital currencies as well as non-central bank-sponsored digital currencies,” the finance chief said Monday.
Winters said the greatest opportunity for digital currencies could be in new, niche segments that don’t replicate existing fiat currencies. Digital currencies could be created for specific types of projects, such as trading in the voluntary carbon market, for example, suggested Winters. That would provide users, who want to offset their carbon emissions, confidence that the financing behind their project is “verified, standardised, monitored,” he said.
“Those sorts of applications for a digital currency, and creating a digital currency ecosystem, is something that can’t be replicated by a fiat currency, or, most likely, by a central bank digital currency any time soon.”
“The inevitable death of the third-party cookie and the growing regulatory scrutiny of digital advertising ecosystems will force CMOs and their marketing teams to reengineer the way they obtain and manage consumers’ personal data.
“In 2021, one in four CMOs will seek the support of comprehensive consent management solutions that enable contextually relevant, zero-party data collection and allow marketing teams to manage consent, including opt-out and do not sell, and customers’ preferences.
“If implemented properly, these solutions provide marketing teams with increased data granularity and accuracy. They can also deliver CX improvements. CMOs who lack these tools or rely on solutions that focus solely on cookie management and measurements must start evaluating alternative options now.”
Cindy Cohn, executive director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, or EFF: “I think the question is who controls your data. You already own your data most of the time in terms of some kind of a version of ownership, but often you don’t control it because you click it away in that clickwrap moment for most of the services that you use. So it doesn’t matter, the ownership is not making a difference, whether it’s there or it’s not, if you can just click it away.”
Clickwrap refers to the terms and conditions that act as a gatekeeper for most modern websites and services. Signing up for a service, such as Facebook or PayPal, requires agreeing to pages and pages of text, often consisting of confusing legal jargon. Not agreeing to the terms as-stated generally means not using the service or website.
“Controlling your data means that we can put it beyond the scope of a simple clickwrap agreement, and we can say that there are some situations in which your control just cannot be rested from you, it can’t be taken from you. Sometimes maybe not at all, but certainly not with a clickwrap kind of agreement.”
As we all know now, the Justice Department filed an anti-trust lawsuit against Google, saying that its business practices are harmful to users and competitors. The lawsuit said, “By restricting competition in search, Google’s conduct has harmed consumers by reducing the quality of search (including on dimensions such as privacy, data protection, and use of consumer data), lessening choice in search, and impeding innovation.”
Google has prepared for the moment by taking very visible steps to show that it respects consumer privacy. For example, Google launched an ad disclosure schema to make it possible for consumers to see all the cookies tracking them on Chrome. Google’s aim: make a public record of its efforts to respect privacy. Meanwhile, Google will continues to push the boundaries of privacy. I find it interesting that consumers can launch “People Cards” that allow them to create their own knowledge panel – which of course makes it easier for Google to learn something about them and serve up more personalized ads. And consumers are doing the heavy lifting to create the cards!
To access the required levels of ethical data for personalisation while maintaining data integrity and accuracy outside the third-party cookie universe, the natural step is to look to a data consortium – much like ADARA. Data consortiums share non-identifiable data from a number of different sources, with an owned data rights management platform that gives the data owner control over when and where it is used. This allows marketers to obtain a more rounded and full picture of consumers as they interact with multiple brands.
Data isn’t enough on its own. Only by comparing data with other sources can marketers target consumers effectively, as the relationships between data can help advertisers build individual identities. Moving to an identity-based strategy is crucial in a post-cookie world.
Identities are created by layering a series of data points on top of first-party data and then connected into a single, anonymised profile. The resulting profile is called an identity graph. While the use of identity graphs is relatively new to the data industry – there is no current market standard for building out those identities into a single, unified graph – they are important in producing the individual insights needed to fuel personalisation.
According to the report, only a few marketers have gotten to grips with omnichannel marketing. At the time of the survey, 63% of respondents said that they were at a ‘basic’ or ‘developing’ level. Just 11% of marketers report that they are able to ‘deliver integrated and real-time omnichannel experiences, based on a 360-degree customer view’.
Interestingly, the survey highlights the fact that IT executives tend to be less likely than marketers to describe their organisations as ‘proficient’ or ‘optimised’ in relation to omnichannel marketing.
It’s suggested that this is due to IT being more aware of the data and technical risks faced by businesses (as well as the challenges of integrating martech stacks), and therefore less likely to be more optimistic. Or perhaps, rather, more likely to offer a realistic viewpoint.
According to the Australian Community Attitudes to Privacy Survey 2020, seven in 10 respondents nominated privacy as a major concern for them. 87% also wanted more control and choice over the collection and use of their personal information. Additionally, more than half of us (52%) state that companies are generally impersonal and feel a wide gap between expectations and delivery.
So how do brands futureproof themselves for a post-third-party world? By way of first-party data. First-party data is a collection of events and information collected directly from customers, by your brand, based on what they’re doing and how they engage with your product, app and website. It’s data that’s given with consent and is more accurate than third-party data sources. It’s the data your audience is giving directly to you. This gives you the power to analyze how consumers interact with your brand so you can improve the experience you’re providing, both holistically and individually.
Gartner reported last year — and again in the same, updated report this year — that only marketers only use 58% of their martech stack’s full breadth of capabilities because they have trouble with cross-functional collaboration, deal with a “sprawling array” of martech solutions and lack a solid customer data foundation. The research firm reported in these findings in last month’s 2020 Marketing Technology Survey. We also covered last year's report.
How can marketers keep up with the technology innovations? The 58% martech utilization number may suggest, Bloom added, that marketing technology teams responsible for shepherding processes around these tools may need some organizational change — perhaps defaulting to a more agile process where they invest on short martech wins in an unpredictable environment. Marketers face more budget cuts (60% expect moderate to severe cuts to their martech budgets, according to Gartner) and must contend with the disruptive economic and government-level policy changes due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“From a marketing technology standpoint,” Bloom said, “if you can take more of an agile approach that says, ‘Hey, let's do a proof of concept and figure out if it works for this use case, and if it does, let’s expand to another one. Let's learn from those cycles over time.’ And then those kinds of process-driven improvements actually can create a lot more insight that you can use right now, as opposed to thinking, ‘I've got to wait forever to see what this test is gonna pay off.’”
Salesforce has re-architected its underlying infrastructure to make all of its CRM solutions run in the public cloud as part of a program it calls Hyperforce.
Salesforce has long had a strong relationship with infrastructure-as-a-service provider Amazon Web Services (AWS), and has also built relationships with Microsoft Azure, Alibaba Cloud, and Google Cloud Platform over the past few years.
For customers who opt to switch to Hyperforce, Salesforce will shift your Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, Industries, and other CRM products, complete with existing customizations and security controls, to the public cloud according to specific data residency needs and other, as yet unclear factors.
Tony Byrne, founder of Real Story Group focused on the need for an omnichannel stack that will support you through the 2020s (and hopefully longer), and discussed four key themes, including acceleration, flexibility, efficiency, and humanity: - Time is of the essence because things are moving so fast: It should not be about getting the best tools, but about getting the right tools.
- The need for flexibility - especially within teams: working towards tiger teams, where collaboration amongst a group of specialists working together to solve a problem is critical.
- The third theme focuses on efficiency: there are stack redundancy challenges, and marketing attribution is another problem, but Byrne pointed out it's less of a technology problem than a data problem.
- The need to remember our humanity: we need to connect with customers as human beings, Byrne said. We need to flatten internal hierarchies and work together. But to do that, you need the right marketing and CX ops platforms.
1. Consider Software for First-Party Data
2. Keep Scale in Mind: To get the maximum benefit out of first-party data, maximize its scalability.
3. Prioritize Use Cases: identifying and prioritizing the use cases that a company plans to deploy to make intelligent, strategic use of that first-party data.
4. Improve Content Alignment With Target Market
5. Use the Right Technology Architecture
6. Control and Centralize Data
7. Human Enablement: Human enablement involves making sure that the organization is actually prepared from a skills and workflows standpoint to deploy use cases and technology effectively.
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There's a far better approach: give ownership back to the consumer, then ask permission to access that data.
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