How Arizona v Google 2020 is Changing the Market
Tracking Mainstream Marketing Practices
Tracking in the 21st century up until now has been entirely mainstream in marketing. It brought such ease to marketing by automating audiences and ‘cyber stalking’ users. At first they were mutually beneficial. These campaigns allowed advertisers to offer clients products they had already visited. The marketer was able to remind a potential client of an item they had already viewed simply and seamlessly, and the client could appreciate the reminder. Remarketing campaigns take no more than 15 minutes to set up and allow campaigns to seamlessly use internal customer lists, machine learning generated audiences, and more to save vast amounts of time and increase revenue rapidly. It was so unbelievably easy for the marketer, marketing ethics were flippantly forgotten, left at the door discarded.
History of USA Privacy Concerns
In the past, marketing was not quite so effortless. Before the internet was created, marketers have used, what we thought were simple algorithms to track the performance of our advertising. These relied heavily on measurements that were built on performance of our campaigns as a whole. Previously, leveraging intuition, knowledge of the market, mass branding campaigns, and performance testing that this change was commonplace. Today, the memories of marketing in the 20th century all but lapsed.
In 2013, the whistleblower Edward Snowden exposed the NSA/CIA (National Security Agency/Central Intelligence Agency) for tracking people who were not persons of interest. Privacy was not yet a concern to the public. At the time, it appeared that the people saw Snowden as an enemy of the state, and the US Government to this day treats Snowden as a traitor.
Snowden, the rated R Spy Thriller film, hit the box office in 2016. It flopped in the theater. Only grossing $37.3 million with a budget of $40 million. Another indication that Edward Snowden had not been heard by the masses. But the European market began to grow concerned.
In 2016, concern was mounting in Europe. The EU began writing bills tackling internet privacy concerns. Europe successfully implemented the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) on May 25, 2018. This began a massive change in their market forcing marketers to pivot at a pace many had never experienced and without the data that marketing analysts and digital strategists were, until this point, extremely reliant on to make digital marketing decisions.
The people were growing concerned, and in 2018, the Arizona Attorney General filed a suit against Google for the sheer amount of location data they were consuming (Arizona Attorney General v Google 2020). Arizona won on May 27, 2020 for breaching privacy and compliance of tracking against users who had declined location tracking. The lawsuit is heavily redacted but can be found on the Arizona Attorney General Website.
Both in the European market in 2018, and the American market in 2020, this caused a sort of mass panic in specifically marketing but more broadly the media industry as a whole. Marketers that had been in the industry since before the internet was mainstream were confused at this widespread hysteria.
The first time this started to circulate in the media was April of 2021. Apple iOS gave users the option to not be tracked on Facebook’s App. I imagine how the journalist who picked this story up happened to hear about it. Hushed divisive voices in the marketing room of one of the more medium sized media companies, as this journalist walked by looking for a lead.
Finally, privacy was beginning to become mainstream. By 2023, Google will also comply with the lawsuit they lost. In the meantime we will continue to see changes in best practices and privacy information will come down our documentation for the products we are using.
How to Mitigate the damages
First, if not prepared for the changes, it is time to start informing management. Leadership must be aware that the market has changed. More hours will be needed to bring more labor intensive campaigns up to snuff. Eyes also need to be on the current audience and remarketing campaigns. As clients decide to protect their privacy we need to be making sure the campaigns are following the newly implemented rules.
Next, we invest time and resources into analyzing our market. We can look at historical journeys of in-market buyers, as well as common interests of customers historically. For example, ie: still advertise art supplies to those interested in creating art, and creative people. This did not change. People are still very open about their interests.
Since this is ultimately an ethics issue about data privacy, leveraging the data analysis data lifecycle best practices to ensure adherence to current ethical expectations. The data life cycle is to: plan, capture, manage, analyze, archive, and destroy. Privacy is paramount, we must respect our clients. The future is us spearheading a return to marketing morality. The new best practices need to consider ethics in regards to privacy, and we need to be implementing them now.
Conclusion
Everything we have ever known as marketers in the 21st century has included heavy data usage from direct clients. And more so recently even leveraging that into machine learning. But it will be our old ways by 2023. Privacy has become critical, and the market will take another expected turn.
As privacy concerns continue to become the marketing mainstream, we must expect that data is still incredibly valuable. More often companies are buying data where in the past it was taken forcibly. We may find that as in the past we paid for views in a newspaper, on tv, on YouTube and more, we will once again be paying for views, and even more so paying for the data associated with those views. The currency of marketing is changing. The key to knowing the future of the market is keeping an ear to the pavement and watching what the people care about, all while remembering our past. Do not panic; confidence is king. Keep calm and carry on. Marketing and advertising will not die, but the way we do it will indefinitely change.
References:
https://snowdenfilm.com/
https://www.facebook.com/business/help/331612538028890?id=428636648170202
https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/28/22407728/facebook-q1-2021-earnings-apple-regulators-ad-tracking-problems
https://www.privacyshield.gov/article?id=European-Union-Data-Privatization-and-Protection
[J. Credence, Author, self-diagnosed Conspiracy Theorist, fact checker, researcher, wife, and mother of three boys, entrepreneur, and owner Mavenite.Media. Contact: J.Credence@mavenite.media]
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