4 Factors That Will Change How Marketers Use Data

Digital advertising has proven to be resilient in the face of the ongoing pandemic, but marketers who are set to pour dollars into the medium are facing a spate of changes. The $114 billion digital ad industry is facing a year of uncertainty as regulators, platforms and everyday consumers rethink how they interact with advertisers and the technologies they use to track people across the web. Joanna O’Connell, vp and principal analyst at research firm Forrester, laid out the major challenges brands and marketers looking to build out their data-driven practices will face this year during Adweek’s Outlook 2021 summit. But before marketers—who often buy troves of third-party data to help execute targeted ad campaigns—address these concerns, O’Connell said they clearly communicate with consumers about how they gather data and how that data is used. “We need to start treating transparency and choice as our default setting. Consumer transparency and choice need to be baked in at the beginning of the thought of any kind of data-driven marketing approach,” she said. Consumers are taking privacy-protecting actions O’Connell said more people are safeguarding their online privacy by, for instance, using ad blockers or clearing their cache more often. For many, they’re trying to keep “advertisers from getting access to their data.” Privacy regulations With GDPR in Europe and CPRA in California, regulators across the globe are putting more parameters around the collection and use of online data, which could limit the signals marketers have to target consumers. Regulators in the U.K. are also probing Google Chrome’s Privacy Sandbox proposals. U.S. lawmakers have also urged the Federal Trade Commission to investigate “widespread privacy violations” by ad-tech companies. O’Connell also expects a federal privacy law to come stateside, which will impact “the ready and unfettered … availability of consumer data.” Fewer tracking signals Chrome is ridding its browser of third-party cookies in early 2022, and Apple will soon be making the IDFA opt-in. This means there will be significantly fewer identity signals available for both web and mobile advertisers. Industry bodies like the W3C and the Partnership for Responsible Addressable Media are working to build new standards for targeted advertising. O’Connell said any solution to the loss of third-party cookies and device IDs need to embrace the changing sentiments around privacy. “We need to not just think about this as an opportunity to take the old technology and replace it with some kind of workaround, but rather we need to really fundamentally rethink what it means to have the right to get access to consumer data,” she said. The rise of more walled gardens Google, Facebook and Amazon control more than 60% of the digital advertising market. Their unending amounts of first-party data and ad inventory make their offerings attractive to ad buyers. But as the industry continues to scrutinize third-party data, any media owner with direct connections to consumers—like Roku, Disney and Walmart—will be at an advantage, O’Connell said. “When we're talking about a world of less unfettered consumer data access, any company that has direct access to consumers … become[s] more important, more powerful in this new world,” she said. “And the question will be: How unfettered will they allow access to their data to be?” See more of Adweek’s 2021 Outlook coverage, including deep dives from our editors into the future of marketing.

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4 Major Factors That Will Change How Marketers Use Data

The industry needs to 'fundamentally rethink' how targeting will work

Andrew Blustein

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Andrew Blustein