Impact – 2
IRI marketing strategy and effectiveness director Carl Carter quoted in Marketing Week: “Brands need to employ a wider range of data sources and technology to discover consumers’ interests and ensure advertising is cost-effective and efficient, especially when reach is vital due to lower conversion rates in sectors like FMCG. Ultimately privacy and trust are more important going forward and brands have to pay attention to that. The industry is moving towards a ‘first-party identity resolution’ approach to tracking users across touchpoints, which is centred on trust because the data comes from consumer permissions. Over time you can build more quality customer relationships, and can target people more effectively and recommend products that make a difference to their lives. When it comes to marketing effectiveness, it also means closed-loop attribution so you know who has seen your ad and if they have purchased. This should lead to a better return from your ad spend.”
iapp: “The general alignment between Google’s and Apple’s approaches and the synched timing is no accident. Both Apple and Google have issued statements that these changes are driven by consumer demands for privacy and control over their personal information.”
Nishant Desai of Xaxis in MarketingDive: “For advertisers and their partners, third-party cookies today are really just proxies for consumers. We use the data those cookies provide to find people in choice audience segments with messages we hope will engage them. Without that data, marketers will have to find new ways to reach consumers and prospects. We’re being given the push we need to more directly interact with individuals and build one-on-one relationships, which will in turn force us to be more open about how we’re connecting… A new wealth of more direct data will serve several other useful purposes as well. It will make ads better targeted and more effective. It will aid in customer relations, market research and product ideation. One top marketing executive for a major hotel and resort chain recently spoke of asking customers to specify their preferences, then delighting them by deeply customizing their stays to cement their desire to visit the properties again.”
More from MarketingDive: “The email-related features will likely limit the ability of email marketers to collect information about consumers or know when they open emails — a key way to measure the effectiveness of email marketing campaigns…Apple’s previous privacy changes and Google’s deprecation of cookies has led marketers to focus on first-party data. Increasingly, brands use content and e-commerce plays on their own websites to acquire email addresses that can be used for future marketing efforts. Now, as Apple tightens privacy around personal email addresses, the company is potentially limiting the efficacy of these first-party data plays, throwing a new wrench into marketers’ plans as they work to engage online consumers, a segment that continues to grow more important to many businesses.”
Matthew Dunn: “I think the most effective framework for decisions is to treat ‘pixelgeddon’ as a done deal…As a direct “push” channel, email can’t be attention parasitic for long. An email marketer is responsible for the content as a whole — the content-of-interest and the content-that-prompts-action. Because email marketers have control of their audience, in other words, their primary ability to provide content isn’t affected by the broad shift to more privacy. We may be losing one of the secondary measures — the fastest, most immediate feedback loop that was available, aka pixels. But not the primary permission and address, and ability to deliver content at incredibly low cost.” More: “I could see message platforms becoming a genuine alternative to email, and I find myself wondering if Pixelgeddon is just a feint to start moving that direction. Mess with email visibly and consumers would complain; mess with the already-invisible pixel and they’re cheering you on. Meanwhile, that messy, free-range channel (email) is just a little bit weaker as a marketing channel. If email is less measurable, and some new, high-priority-interrupt channel were more measurable and interactive…what, as a marketer, would you do?”
A few more articles detail the impact of Apple’s privacy moves on email marketing:
