Episode 5 – Cookieless and Privacy

Rokture Ramblings – Episode 5 – Cookieless and Privacy are Kiling Digital!

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Rokture Ramblings, where I discuss digital marketing, marketing technology, and marketing operations for the financial services industry. My name is Fernando Pena, and I’m the founder of Rokture, where I can help you master the digital channel. Today’s topic is one that has a bit of a sky is falling type of feeling to it. There’s been a lot of discussion around cookie lists and privacy. Have they killed digital marketing? And I guess if I were to answer this briefly, the answer there is, yes, they have. So I guess if you accept that answer, pack your bags, go home, look for a different career and forget about all this happening. But if you’re not satisfied with that answer, then let’s discuss and see how we can try to persevere through all these regulatory and technology changes and what we can do to make sure that we still succeed as marketers. So today we’ll go over an overview as to what it is that’s taking place, the impact to marketing efforts, adapting

to this increased regulation and also the overall benefits. I think there’s some good that’s coming out of this as well. First a disclaimer, and I hate these as much as you do, but please I’m not a legal professional by any means. I just speak from my experiences and my interpretation of these privacy laws. There’s a lot of them out there and a lot of them are local or specific to certain regions or municipalities, so please discuss any initiatives or changes that you’re going to undergo with your legal counsel and your risk and compliance departments as well. So with that out of the way, let’s go ahead and talk about exactly what it is that we are encountering here. There’s an increasing number of privacy laws that are specifying the use for data for marketing purposes. And these laws are impacting not only processes, but they’re also impacting technology as well. So we really have two different things that are taking place here. We have technology changes. That’s the cookie list. And

then we also have laws impacting our use of data, and that’s the privacy part of it. Now, the privacy part actually applies outside of just digital, so it’s really a bigger problem or a bigger opportunity depending on how you look at it. But digital, of course, is a prominent part of it because that’s where the scalability factor took place. This legislation is either local or regional. So for example, in the United States, we don’t really have a very stringent privacy law or or and cookieless is obviously not a law either. But in the EU, for example, there are some laws that are a lot more restricted than they would be here in the US. And there are some states that are starting to mimic some of those EU laws. But again, this isn’t a nationwide initiative. So it’s very important to understand where it is that you stand in terms of your locality and what applies to you so that you can make sure to take advantage of the opportunities available to you. The cookie list is actually third party

cookies that are being phased out and what that means is that these are cookies from other sites not being accessible to you as a marketer. You’re still able to cookie your own internal sessions and with that you’ll be able to provide those personalized experiences that we’ve been discussing but in terms of accepting data from other sites that’s where we have restrictions. Now, regardless of what laws are taking place, there’s an increased sort of scrutiny and visibility on the use of data throughout. So there’s been a lot of data breaches. There’s been a lot of talk about how data is being misused. And as a result of that, visitors are well aware of what their rights are and what expectations they may have as well. Sometimes those expectations surpass the current laws, but it’s up to you as being a good corporate citizen as to what you plan to do with that data going forward.

So what impact does it have to marketing? The first thing is that inability now to track activities from third -party websites. So I discussed that you’re still able to cookie the session on your site, but you really won’t be able to get all that enriched data that’s coming from other sites. So that’s something that we’ve sort of taken for granted in the past where we can use this information for marketing purposes, but that’s something that we will not be able to do so going forward. There’s also going to be less third -party data enrichment available. So in the past, we’d be able to send a file to a company, and they would just overlay all this multitude of information. That’s going to be a little harder to do now. It’s still likely going to be out there, but it may be derived data and not actually self -reported. And it’s also likely going to be a little bit more inaccurate than in the past. And so the last one is that preferences must be captured and honored. So what that means is that

you have to observe when they say, do not email me. You also should be able to provide maybe an additional level of detail where you can say, do not email me more than twice a week, for example. So it’s really providing the ability for them to dictate their preferences and how they want to communicate with you. And that’s something that does have to be observed as even if it doesn’t say So from a regulatory perspective, it’s a good idea to make sure that you are observing your customer preferences so that they continue to do business with you.

So adaptation. And so what I bring here is an old term from many years ago, progressive profiling. And what that means is that in the past, again, we’ve been reliant upon third party data. Now we’re going to instead have to make sure that we capture that information on our own. So this is is a huge benefit to us and we’ll talk about that in the next slide because you’re able to to really Capture information that is accurate because it’s coming directly from the source but it a lot of times people are not going to want to enter a form of 10 or 15 fields with their information So progressive profiling is the idea that each time you interact with them you capture one additional piece of information Over time, you build up a full profile of that individual and you’re able to now market to them more effectively. The next thing is think locally. So a lot of companies use the sort of shotgun approach when it comes to their privacy standards, and a lot of that is dictated by their legal team. The

legal team sees that, for example, a company in the EU has to observe a very stringent privacy law, but maybe in your location you don’t. So, in that case, instead of applying this approach where you automatically blanket everyone with automatic cookie consent, or restricting the ability to market to them in a certain manner, look at your local laws and see if that applies to you. Because although it may seem easier to just go with something that applies all across the board, your competitors likely are not doing the same, and in that case, they have a competitive advantage over you. And the other thing too is that with these smaller institutions, a lot of times you don’t have an international presence. So as long as you’re not marketing to that international audience, you’re still able to observe the laws that are applicable to you and your local area. So look into that and think locally. The next thing is that lead magnets become a lot more critical. And lead magnets are resources or

assets that individuals are very interested in. And in that case, they enter either personal information or consent to be marketed to in an agreement to giving them this asset or access to that asset. So this becomes more critical because, again, you need that information from a progressive profiling perspective. Contextual advertising will return. And what that means is that instead of targeting a message directly to an individual because of certain pieces of information that you have to them, target them more contextually because you may not necessarily have all the data that you need to market to them. So if you’re marketing, for example, in search results, then market to the term and not necessarily the individual. It is less effective in all honesty, but it may be the only approach that you have when it comes to trying to market to individuals without that additional data that was previously available. Remarketing. So once you have somebody who enters your landing page or website,

then you can actually cookie them. And in that case, then you’d be able to remarket. So the the ad network still accept that it’s just that again, information itself can’t be transferred throughout, but you’d be able to at least continue to remarket them. And and hopefully that would help with when it comes to positive reinforcement of your message or your offer your brand. The one thing that I’ve noticed that in speaking to a lot of clients is that they often see a tremendous drop in the volume of opportunities that are out there. And so what we had to do is to sort of reset our thinking and think about results and not necessarily volume. So instead of being able to send, um, 10 ,000 emails, you may only be able to send 3000 emails instead of, um, putting an ad with 150 ,000 impressions, you may only get a third of that. And so it’s a matter of really recalibrating your KPIs and making sure that you’re looking at what opportunities are out there and the actual results from those opportunities.

Since you are targeting and hopefully capturing information that is from the first party source here, you’re able to be more relevant. And that’s something we’ll get into in the next slide with benefits. But again, the thing here is that track results and not necessarily how many certain interactions you’re having.

So the benefits, there’s more first party data. If you do this properly, it’s never a bad thing to have more data on your customers. and it’s a good thing in terms of being able to make sure that your message is more targeted and relevant and so are your offers. So really that is is the core of all the benefits here. It may not seem or it may seem like there’s a lot of obstacles and hurdles in getting this information but once you get it then you’re at a competitive advantage over your your competitors because of the fact that you have first -party information that was provided to you by this prospect. So there will be a reduction of volume and subsequently you should realize a reduction of costs as well. Now a lot of times with something like email there’s not a huge incremental cost going from x number to 4x that number but still there’s some efficiencies and also some labor that is involved in creating different offers and so you may realize some decrease in cost as a result of that

more targeted approach. So this was just a brief overview of what to expect when it comes to these impending regulations and laws that are coming. If you’d like to discuss this a little bit more, I have my contact information here on this page, and we’d be able to discuss your specific scenario, and if we may be able to determine what type of strategy we need in order to be able to proceed going forward. So with that, I thank you all for your time and we will talk again the next episode. Bye bye.