In the early days of the internet, I would ask university students in the courses I taught if they even cared about privacy. The reply was almost always resounding, deafening indifference. I suppose you can chalk some of this up to asking college students (who are often preoccupied with other things), but the lopsided results seemed to indicate that there was something deeper. “Maybe,” I remember thinking, “millennials and Generation Z just don’t feel the same way about privacy as their parents.”
I’m not sure I was wrong, but either way, boomers and X’ers took it upon themselves to put the clamps down on search engines and social media before their kids could even look up from their phones, forcing our tech companies to stop throwing data around like cheap candy at a small-town parade. The results – especially over the past couple of years – have been good for privacy but tough on communication targeting.
Specifically, there have been two obvious shifts in the world of digital marketing. First, governments of all shapes and sizes have started to enact their own regulations on collecting data, and second, big data companies that used to be able to snoop into anything they wanted now have to aggregate their data a lot more, providing “educated guesses” in some of the places where we got used to seeing hard numbers.
Cookie content forms now welcome us on virtually every website we visit. Why? Because states from Connecticut to California have enacted data privacy laws, and the internet doesn’t do a good job of heeding state lines (sort of like Bo and Luke when they were running away from Sheriff Roscoe P. Caltrane on the Dukes of Hazard). As a result, everybody needs to play it safe and try to cover all of the possible privacy laws, just in case. If your website isn’t on board with this, consider yourself warned. Eventually, somebody is going to start enforcing those things, and it isn’t going to be pretty.
While legal language about privacy continues to get sharper and more specific, targeting a specific audience using data is getting a bit more foggy, especially if you don’t know what you’re doing. As third-party cookies become less and less effective (because companies are restricted from sharing your data without permission), tracking a user across platforms has become more and more challenging. Companies like Google and Meta are still using their first-party cookies, but even that data gets less and less accurate the more users are able to opt out of services.
To combat this, the tech giants are suggesting that you use their AI assistants. In theory, this would be helpful (remember those educated guesses I mentioned?), but in practice, AI has a long way to go in the world of online marketing. Asking Chat GPT to write your letter to the condo association is one thing, putting an AI in charge of your Google Ads budget is something different entirely. If you aren’t watching closely, that helpful AI will happily burn through your budget showing your ads to prospects that seem correct, but aren’t really correct.
Experience helps. When everybody had to stop using postal codes to target credit products (pretty much anything for a bank, for example), it became necessary to target by city and state names. It was a nuisance, but not that big of a deal – unless you trusted the platform to help you out. If your campaigns were on auto-pilot, then you would have likely missed the emails sent out by the platform and your campaigns would have been simply paused until you checked on them (and fixed them). This kind of maintenance is becoming more and more important, it seems.
The key is this: if you know your customers, you can still find them online.
If they love golf or country music, for instance, then you can combine several characteristics to minimize the amount of wasted impressions. I’ll explain it this way: In the interest of privacy, you can’t really track what an individual engineer likes to consume online anymore, but you can still target your messages to what engineers in general like to consume online. There are still exceptions to this (using email addresses, etc.), but I feel like they may be the next victims of our shift toward a more private online society.
If this sounds familiar, it’s because this is sort of how targeting has worked since the early days of newspaper and television advertising. It’s more refined, includes more metrics and has a lot more options (which, in itself, improves the act of targeting), but it shares a good number of qualities as well (remember Nielsen and Arbitron? Those were also “educated guesses,” just more primitive). I guess what I’m trying to say is that if you understand your business and your customers, there are still plenty of good ways to reach them using digital platforms. You just need to stay on top of things, because they seem to change every week.
Anchor can help, if you’d like. We assist our clients with digital marketing, social media and marketing automation, but also with things like cookie consent forms for their websites. Just give us a call.
