At the end of September, the IAB announced that digital ad spend in the UK had recovered to a 49% increase in 2021 after the dip at the start of the pandemic last year.
This is a clear indicator of brands’ investment and confidence in the power of digital in advertising and marketing. This has been some positive news after some hard hits the industry saw last year, but recently the conversation surrounding digital poses a new challenge: data privacy.
Breaches in privacy and consumer security, both on an ethical and technological level, have left many unsure of how to approach digital marketing and what this means for our insights into audience data.
For years companies have learned about their customers by forming individual profiles from third-party cookies, social content, purchased demographics, and more. Apple’s privacy implementations in iOS 14.8 and iOS 15 show that users have opted to stop apps from tracking their activity for ad targeting. Google has also announced that it will no longer support third-party cookies and will stop tracking on an individual basis altogether through its Chrome browser.
This leaves us with companies eager and willing to spend budget on digital but an unsure and changing ad-to-consumer digital landscape. So where to from here?
An article on TechCrunch titled, ‘The death of identity: Knowing your customer in the age of data privacy’, argues that this change is positive and offers businesses an opportunity to “overhaul their relationship with customer data to focus solely on first-party data and patterns of behavior”.
Real-time analysis
We are lucky to be living in a time where AI and ML (machine learning) have seen rapid advances in behavioural intelligence. Companies can leverage digital experience intelligence (DXI) from these behavioral patterns and context them across massive behavioral datasets. These DXI platforms can layer ML and AI onto complete, retroactive behavioral and session data to generate immediate, rich insights.
Companies/brands can then use these insights to cluster users who take similar types of actions and target them more intelligently, while also discovering patterns that can lead to new opportunities. We are understanding how customers engage, and why — all while protecting their privacy.
Relook at how you are approaching connecting with your customers.
Email marketing
With the new iOS release, Mail Privacy Protection was offered as an opt-in feature in the Apple Mail app. But this doesn’t mean email marketing is no longer an option for digital campaigns.
In ‘IOS 15 Is Not The Death Of Email Marketing’, an article published in Forbes earlier this month, the argument for email marketing lies both in stats (not everyone uses an iPhone/iPad, or Mac; especially true in a majority Android South African market), as well as in, once again, realizing that the onus lies on campaign managers to ensure they are creating good, customer-specific content.
Relook at how you are approaching connecting with your customers. Consider using a two-fold text and email approach to get your mails read. Customers will read things that interest and appeal to them.
Doing digital
Progress happens and digital is constantly evolving. Keeping abreast of these changes is by far the best strategy. If you believe in your brand/business there is a digital campaign to help market it.
Contact Us to assist you with a new way forward.
References:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2021/10/01/ios-15-is-not-the-death-of-email-marketing/?sh=25a892927486
https://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/digital-adspend-surges-42-compared-pre-pandemic-levels/1729020