By Sahil Chopra
Digital advertising has come a long way in meeting a long list of consumer demands for digital data privacy. However, these new changes are costing brands their potential customers.
Now advertisers have a more significant challenge in hand – figuring out the future of the digital advertising industry. The need of the hour is to strike the right balance between data privacy and marketing utility. Marketers are tasked with finding ways to help brands reach their target audience without breaching the new privacy-enhancing technologies.
Digital advertising may have welcomed a few changes, but consumer behaviour will always remain at its heart. Brands successful in establishing their credibility in the market have the upper hand and are given priority by people. This should be a reminder for all the marketers to stick to the roots of advertising. Efforts to understand your audience and trying different ways to engage them is what proves to be beneficial in the long run. Making crucial marketing decisions based on an analytics report and other technologies might not always be the wisest call.
Digital advertising is undergoing changes across platforms. Consumer, being the first and foremost priority, has the freedom to choose. Brands are focussing aggressively on giving their customers ample choices. Needless to say, consumers will use their discretion when it comes to opting in or out of data gathering. It wouldn’t be wrong to say the future of digital advertising will bring in several rules and regulations around data privacy, which is why we must be prepared.
We should see these protocols as an opportunity to find better ways of reaching our potential customers. For example, rather than having a granular level approach to targeting an audience, thanks to data analytics, we should widen our practice and look at the behavioural actions of our audience. Moreover, having high-level metrics will help brands target a large group of audiences.
As we continue to have more eyes on data privacy, brands can find their silver lining in the entire process of transparency. This will bring a new turning point in the relationship between agencies and brands. Marketers should prepare to show brands what goes behind the scenes and help them understand the nitty-gritty of digital advertising. However, it is a double-edged sword, given it will allow your competitors to see your digital methods as it will enable you to view theirs.
Today, consumers are well-informed about the brands they interact with on a daily basis. Nearly every other app prompts users to share their personal information with the brand. However, only the brands that have good credibility get access to using customers’ information. What is not appreciated is the fact that the same information is shared with third-party websites. To curb this, we need a strict approach to minimize digital data sharing and promote privacy. Regarding transparency, brands must also give users information about how their personal information is used.
The good news is we can expect new tools, such as AI, to come to our aid in decoding consumer behavioural patterns.
The author is founder & CEO, iCubesWire