Marketers are overwhelmingly wary of privacy impacts on success outcomes, but relief is coming into view
Marketers just can’t seem to catch a break.
Two years ago, Covid had them fretting about whether consumers were going to keep spending. Then supply chain disruptions started wreaking havoc on inventory.
Just as these issues finally start to get sorted (and a potential global recession looms), privacy challenges have snuck up to disrupt tried and true strategies.
This time around, it seems almost everyone is feeling the pressure.
In a quantitative study of 400 pre-qualified marketers from Ericsson’s Emodo Institute, , two-thirds of respondents specifically expressed concerns about identity and privacy. 80% said they are experiencing a decline in campaign effectiveness as a result of ID loss with 82% of C-level marketers experiencing decreased scale in campaigns.
How did this issue creep up so quickly?
We’ve previously covered some of the privacy trends unfolding around the world. Regulators are coming after cookies. Location tracking is getting a major side-eye. And let’s not forget that we’re about one year on from Apple shifting its device tracking model to opt-in. This is seriously obscuring what advertisers know about the person behind the device.
Their concerns aren’t unfounded, nor are they overstated. But there is hope on the horizon in the form of a continued content boom.
The good news is people still love free stuff
Trends may come and go but one truth has been enduring: consumers really like free stuff. It’s why they tend to click on “accept all cookies” to access an article. It’s why they give away info to watch online videos. It’s why they exchange their time to view an ad before getting to the content they really want.
Perhaps there’s no greater recent example of how intertwined content and advertising remain than Netflix finally capitulating to consumers clamoring for an ad-supported subscription tier. They swore up and down they’d never do it…until the market made it unavoidable.
It’s true, marketers soon won’t be able to advertise on the cheap to persona-based identities. But they will be able to maximize every dollar spent marketing to real people based on confirmed interests and behaviors.
Content is king and why that matters for marketers
If keeping up with niche cable content was aking to facing a fire hydrant, streaming is like staring down a tsunami. Attention for eyeballs has never been more fierce but serving precisely curated content to qualified audiences is becoming an art.
Luckily, advertisers will be able to ride on the back of this work.
There are two primary philosophies when it comes to data and marketing for content.
The first is simple: if you target people with specific content that audiences are interested in, they will engage more.
The second is more complex but makes complete sense: if you further segment these audiences based on hundreds of unique qualifiers, they’ll behave similarly to other people like them. This will drive even higher engagement.
At BRIDGE, we’ve amassed 4,000 personally identifiable information (PII-based) data attributes on more than 250M people in our permission-based database. We know the people behind those content views and so can market to them effectively based on demographics, interest-level, purchase data, and so on. None of this information is personally sensitive (e.g., finance or health-related), so it never poses a risk to the consumer.
The Global Database Marketing Association (GDMA) found that 64% of consumers are willing to exchange data to access free content. We expect this number to grow as consumers become comfortable with a new privacy paradigm and companies demonstrate they can handle their data with care.
Yes, the world is changing. Yes, there are more hoops to jump through. But the rewards on the other side are arguably greater, especially as it relates to ROI. The audiences may be smaller but in our experience, engagement can be up to 3-4x greater. In other words, not all hope is lost. Quite the opposite, in fact.
It is possible to play on the right side of privacy and still achieve engagement at scale.
