Consumer data privacy and the experience dividend
When creating compelling digital content, brands and agencies must give thought to fundamentals including creative, media placement, and brand safety. Today, a fourth factor is proving to be increasingly important to successful brand communications: consumer data privacy. As we shall see, brands and agencies that lean heavily into practices that protect consumer privacy stand to benefit greatly over their peers by being able to offer the type of experiences that consumers increasingly demand.
What is consumer data privacy?
Consumer data privacy, or customer data privacy as it is also known, is the practice of protecting the privacy of the personally identifiable information (PII) provided to brands by their customers.
Historically, digital marketing practises have largely ignored customer data privacy protection. Instead, they have made free use of PII provided by third-party tracking cookies and mobile advertising IDs to deliver personalised content to consumers. This is understandable – survey after survey shows that consumers appreciate relevant digital experiences – but the practice is fast becoming outdated.
Why is consumer privacy important
Today, brands and agencies are more aware of the need to protect customer privacy. In part, this is down to the “stick” of global privacy laws like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and the emerging American Data Privacy and Protection Act (ADPPA). Increasingly, if brands fail to protect the privacy of consumer data in their promotions, they face severe fines and the associated brand damage. In practice, that means brands need to ensure they have the consent of consumers when using their data for personalised content.
There’s also the “carrot” of customer demand. More and more, consumers require brands to be privacy aware, and to protect their personal data. Brands that do so are more likely to win consumers’ custom and their loyalty. This is one element of an experience dividend to customer data privacy protection. Brands that get consumer data privacy right, stand to benefit greatly.
Five stats that show the experience dividend of consumer data privacy
- 71% of consumers would stop doing business with a company if it gave away sensitive data without permission
- 86% of consumers “care about data privacy” and want more control
- 60% of British consumers report that they would be willing to pay more to use or buy from an organisation that expressed their commitment to personal data protection
- 62% of consumers believe that data collection and privacy is more important than predictive insights and customer acquisition
- Just 40% of consumers trust brands to keep their personal information secure and use it responsibly
Addressing consumers’ privacy concerns
On a basic level, brands and advertisers need to ensure that their advertising campaigns do not pass unconsented customer data down the media supply chain. However, this is only part of the problem.
The challenge is that brands also need to meet consumer demand for personalised experiences. After all, 71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalised interactions, and a further 76% say they get frustrated when this doesn’t happen. Simply doing away with personalisation, and the use of consumer data that involves, is clearly not the answer. Rather, brands need to find a way to continue delivering personalised content, but in a privacy compliant manner.
One solution is to replace outdated tracking cookies with privacy-first telco-verified IDs. These IDs embed privacy and consent into the programmatic advertising process, while simultaneously supporting personalised campaigns. Telco-verified IDs, such as Novatiq’s Zenith ID, leverage telco network intelligence to verify pseudonymised user profiles with no PII being exchanged. Publishers and brands can verify all consented users across sites and devices and create unified profiles, even if users have not signed in.
Brands can then reach their audiences in real-time using a transaction ID, such as Novatiq’s Hyper ID. Each unique transaction ID is verified by telco partners. As soon as the ID is verified by the telco, smart technology associates the requested audience segments to it – filtered to send specific responses to each buy-side platform. Once used in the ad transaction, the ID vanishes, so no data can inadvertently travel down the media supply chain.
Why consumer data privacy matters
Consumer data privacy matters to brands, because it matters to consumers and the regulators that have consumers’ interests at heart. Brands that can evolve and offer privacy centric personalised content and experiences will provide what consumers want and as a result they will experience a significant dividend by winning new customers and building brand loyalty. Consumer data privacy compliance is not an unfortunate necessity, it’s an important way for brands to differentiate and grow. Companies that embrace this way of thinking stand to make significant gains.
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