“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
Today’s column is written by Matt Voda, CEO at OptiMine Software.
The 2019 holiday season is nearly complete, and in only a matter of days, thousands of companies doing business in the United States will be forced to grapple with the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). For the first time US businesses will be subject to broader and stricter privacy regulations, which will cause the 2020 holiday season to look quite different from a marketing perspective.
Beginning Jan. 1, California residents can legally demand that companies disclose whatever personal data have been collected about them and request to be “forgotten,” which would require the data to be immediately discarded and not sold to other companies. As a result, marketers can expect fewer and less effective consumer-targeting options heading into prime purchasing season next year as more consumers opt out. Opted-out consumers will encounter more irrelevant advertising.
With less effective, pinpointed advertising and a smaller consumer pool due to opt-outs, marketers will be forced to find new and inventive approaches to reach consumers during the holidays next year.
Brands may take another look at traditional media options that have been updated with more modern targeting technologies. Don’t be surprised to find more crowded physical mailboxes next holiday season as flyers, postcards and other ad mailers add to the annual deluge of Christmas cards.
Channels such as direct mail and print, which have household-level local targeting options, may regain favor when brands need to be highly specific about the types of customers they must reach. Even hyperlocal OOH – when digitally enabled – will likely see a lift. These traditional media options will offer privacy-compliant methods and can be more cost-effectively scaled than in the past.
At this point next year, brands will still be racing to build their own first-party data moats. Expect to see a greater number and broader range of incentives to inspire consumers to opt in to sharing personal information. Brands will more aggressively invest in loyalty programs with deeper hooks into mobile experiences for more continuous and location-specific engagement. This should all spell good news for consumers.
A year from now, marketers should be much more sophisticated in rationalizing customer acquisition costs against lifetime value. The brands that are best able to measure this the fastest will know exactly how to allocate marketing spend for the highest quality acquisition efforts.
Marketing measurement will also evolve heavily in 2020. By December 2020, multitouch attribution will likely be dead. Any attribution approach that attempts to stitch together a “path to purchase” will face major sections of the roadway missing.
And also at this time next year, new industries will have cropped up to help marketers manage the incredibly complex state-by-state compliance maze. Compliance, auditing and marketing operations processes need new solutions, and so we should expect a market to emerge inclusive of new roles within the enterprise that merge these now separate enterprise functions.
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Some brands have been more proactive than others with their CCPA responses. More heavily regulated industries such as insurance and healthcare have more mature compliance processes in place, and other large-scale companies have enacted comprehensive audits of their marketing operations – all the way to their marketing vendor constellations.
It would be easy for brands to wait and see how the chips fall, perhaps looking to the European Union as an example of what to expect based on the rollout of GDPR in 2018. But a wait-and-see approach isn’t a recipe for success, and time is running out.
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