If we know that shoppers don’t like targeting based on third-party information sharing or inferred user attributes, we’d have to be pretty stupid to be transparent and tell them that this is what we are doing. We’ve always thought in the past that shoppers were willing to give us information in order for us to improve their experience. Maybe this is coming to an end or maybe we need to deliver a demonstrably better experience for them. When I say that, I mean that the shopper has to believe the experience is better, not the provider – too often we substitute the latter for the former.

Just because you CAN do something, doesn’t mean you SHOULD. It’s pretty obvious to consumers how much they are being targeted and tracked. In fact, paranoia reigns …

There is so much disdain and condescension toward customers going on. Because I’m involved somewhat in the agriculture world, I keep getting the image of us being like hens or piglets jammed into unnatural environments generating data with every breath we take. There was a Starbucks item on RetailWire a while back that showed we can’t even get a cup of coffee without becoming data. Even the comment that people “don’t always behave logically … ” is nonsense. Just whose “logic” are we talking about here? This whole thing is aimed at how to make us chickens and piglets think this constant analysis is actually good for us. The brutal truth is we’re being used. It is time to revolt!

Happy to see this as a topic as Maritz worked with HBS on the “Ads That Don’t Overstep” study. Definitely a key to note is that if there was already an established sense of trust between a consumer and the site they are on, then greater transparency was well-received and viewed more as a sign of mutual respect. As Tom calls out in the “Why Am I Seeing This Ad” study, the opposite reaction is very common when consumers don’t feel like they have that same relationship. The tricky part for businesses is knowing when they have entered the “friend-zone” (which is a good thing here!).

The backlash already exists as consumer dissatisfaction with advertising online is quite high. The trust studies of advertising types have shown this for years. But I don’t think the digital industry has allowed itself to hear this. In part, too many raise funding by continuing to use theories from the 2000s about how the web is “more trustworthy” and how “personalization” will make sure consumers only see ads that are meaningful to them. What the digital ad folks don’t see is how often “personal” means that the advertiser decides the consumer is personally interesting to the advertiser and continues to foist whatever ads make the ad server or the advertiser money. The question is: Will transparency change any of that? At core, consumers don’t want ads online. They are particularly more bothersome than ads on TV or radio or newspaper or magazine or outdoors. Transparency won’t fix that issue. We see this in the incredible struggle for sites like Pinterest, Instagram and Snap to discover advertising strategies despite having massive audience highly pleased with the… Read more »

My experience in talking with brand marketers is that people generally ignore ads, especially ones that are irrelevant. Sure, the media highlights examples that inflame the psyche to boost ratings, however individuals generally don’t give a hoot. Surveys have been misleading, as respondents will report that they have privacy concerns, yet their actual behavior does not support those statements. The bigger issue is the fact that too many irrelevant ads still exist.

Transparency will DEFINITELY lead to a backlash. I think it will be more with Gen Z than Millennials, though (Boomers: impervious). You’ll see youth pushing back on the issues that us adults either are too locked in on or just plain UN-informed. Go kids, go, show us some common sense.

All surveys I have seen show that people do not like advertising. They do not like it on their TV, on the web, on their phone, etc. Yet they understand that is the cost of free media. People want relevant messages more than irrelevant ones, which is what precision targeting does. Most people do not understand that relevance comes from data. That is the marketing community’s job to convey this. Targeting will be very important in a GDPR future, but it will be based more on first party data that is fully permissioned. I think the only losers might be 3rd party data aggregators, but I’m sure they have lawyers working on this right now.

Consumers give information to get something in return, either improved experience, financial compensation, or both to retailers. If the entity cannot demonstrate the value to the consumer, then the explanation and transparency makes it worse.

It’s not really about transparency as much as it is about how targeting practices are applied. I think most consumers are wise to the practices these days. Think of it this way — cross-site web tracking is akin to someone at the mall following you all day as you visit multiple stores then jumping out of the shadows and holding a “special offer” in front of your face for one of the stores you haven’t visited yet! If shopper sentiment towards this type of digital advertising is low, it’s just telling us that the experience delivered isn’t what shoppers want. How many times have we heard reports that shoppers will give up personal data if in exchange they get a truly better and worthy experience? We have to assume the industry just isn’t delivering that experience yet. Technology solutions will continue to try and improve this, inserting AI and other techniques into the mix. As long as there are advertisers willing to spend money on these techniques that they believe to deliver the right audience,… Read more »

When trying to understand how consumers will react to a change in the level of transparency used by advertisers, or changes to the techniques being used to deliver ads online, I struggle as consumers themselves don’t behave consistently in how they give up their data to various parties online. Let me explain. Consumers sign EULA for software they purchase as well as use SSO to create accounts at e-commerce sites using their Google, Facebook or Twitter account information. It is safe to say that few of the EULA’s are read and that few consumers understand what they are giving away through their use of SSO. Over 4 million people have sent their DNA to Ancestry.com through the mail to an unknown place where “someone” analyzes their family origins and returns a report. These examples tell us that consumers will release more information than they realize they are sharing and do so without prejudice if they think they are receiving a worthwhile benefit. The standards consumers use to evaluate the use of their online behaviour by… Read more »

The rest of the world, particularly Asia, have already moved beyond these concerns and have largely determined a personalized experience is worth the occasional intrusion. I believe we are slower to transition to an acceptance of this reality due to two factors. First, unlike China and the rest of Asia, we have to decouple from a culture built on decades of landlines and PCs into a fully mobile mentality which they did not have to contend with. Second, our much more fragmented digital landscape vs. the near duopolies of Tencent and Alibaba make a cohesive and holistic feeling platform challenging.

In the end, however, I believe we will culturally migrate to a similar acceptance of a digital lifestyle with mostly first party data permissions driving our digital choices and ads.