How Your Advertising Strategy Can Triumph Over Privacy Laws

Privacy is a hot topic for marketers. Why? Right now, privacy is challenging your advertising strategy. Customers are demanding assurance that they are respected and that their personal information is safe.

Pew Research surveyed Americans and found that the majority feel like their personal data is less secure nowadays. People feel that data collection has many more risks than benefits. Most also believe it’s impossible to avoid being tracked in today’s world.

These concerns are driving some big changes.

We may remember when the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) first appeared and we placed cookie notices on our websites. However, new changes are coming in technology, laws, and the tools we all use – which will impact all marketers far more deeply than GDPR.

What are these changes and what do they mean for you? How can you adapt? What is the new way to win?

New Changes In Privacy

Current rules require that when people share their information, they can opt out, where their data is removed from marketing databases. People also have a right to know how their data is used and who can access it.

However, some companies are still not transparent and don’t follow these laws as they collect data. What are the consequences?

Data breaches and government inquiries are forcing giant companies to respond. Legislators are now drafting laws much broader than GDPR or the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).

Another big change involves third-party cookies. What are these? Let’s say you own website A. You want to monetize your site, so you decide to display ads from company X on your web pages. When visitors come to your site, some tracking information from X is placed on their device.

This allows company X to measure and interpret the effectiveness of its advertising campaign. This tracking also allows X to display its ads to you when you visit other sites besides A.

Back in 2013, Firefox, Brave, and Safari browsers started blocking these third-party cookies. In mid-2022, Google started phasing out third-party cookies as well, and a full two-thirds of all desktop computers use Chrome.

And, of course, we cannot forget the ever-changing Apples IOS Privacy Updates. Cookies are being threatened from every direction.

What Do These Changes Mean For The Future Advertising Strategy?

This puts the burden on marketers, not shoppers, to comply with privacy laws. All this while marketers must find new ways to know and reach prospects – and deal with increasing ad costs.

Where is the online ad market going? Many experts are talking about “walled gardens.”

These are large companies that collect and store their own data. They also maintain their own data security and privacy. They’re like a closed ecosystem that doesn’t depend on anyone else–third-party cookies, for example–for data or analytics.

What are some examples of these walled gardens? Amazon, Facebook, Google, and YouTube are the top four. Right now, they account for about 66% of all US digital ad revenue.

Here’s What You Need To Know About Walled Gardens

What are the advantages of using walled gardens for your marketing? You get tools and reports. You can immediately reach a large audience. In addition, you can ethically access data found nowhere else. Marketing is targeting, and these walled gardens give you some advanced targeting methods.

However, relying on these companies has some disadvantages. They completely control the collection of the data. Not only that, their data is aggregated, or presented in a summarized way, to comply with privacy laws.

Good marketers will not rely 100% on someone else to collect data. These walled gardens make it difficult to compare your advertising efforts outside their systems. Advertising with them, you must depend on their reporting to measure and interpret the success of your campaigns.

More Advertising Strategy Changes Ahead

As large data breaches continue to make the news, it’s almost certain people will distrust ethical consumer surveillance and data collection even more.

In 2021, Gartner researched privacy trends in 1200 companies in 6 industries. What did they find? They are predicting 3 possible future scenarios:

  1. The law will grant only a limited few companies the right to collect data.
  2. Only tech widgets involving blockchain or intelligent proxy agents like voice assistants will be allowed to collect data.
  3. Only walled gardens will collect data, but they will allow you to compare the existing data you’ve collected with theirs.

More information can be found here

What Does This Mean For You?

Your goal should be to track prospects across websites, devices, and marketing channels, such as different social media platforms.

Commit to learning all you can about privacy. In today’s busy world, It’s tempting to just do the minimum to comply with the law. However, the more you learn, the more you prepare for the future.

New privacy changes mean that your marketing strategy will have to be flexible. It means partnering with data providers that take consumer safeguards seriously – and are completely ethical and transparent in the way they handle data. More and more consumers want to give their business to companies that value their privacy.

How Do You Win?

Learn how to collect first-party data – the data you own, that you directly collect from people. This is data that comes from your social media, your analytics tools, your newsletter signups, marketing campaigns, in-person events, and sales calls.

Build your own data collection plan. Partner with ethical marketers that can advise you on how to collect your own data, as well as match your data with theirs.

First Direct can help you succeed with your advertising strategy while ethically collecting and leveraging your data. Get in touch with us today to find out how.


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