4 Predictions for How the CCPA Will Take Us Back to the Future
Happy New Year! Anyone with me in remembering days from childhood when “2020” sounded like a far-off realm of the future? Five-year-old me certainly believed there’d be flying cars and robots that clean our houses by now. Well, between the questionable relationship between humans and self-driving cars and up-to-no-good Roombas, we can all agree that we’re at least halfway there.
For those of us in advertising, however, 2020 feels a bit more Back to the Future than The Jetsons. The turn of the year marked the minute we sped from 87 to 88 MPH, zapping back in time to an era when we couldn’t use data to pinpoint the moment a woman was pregnant before she told her own family.
OK. Maybe that’s a stretch. But hear me out: starting January 1st, the CCPA, or the California Consumer Privacy Act, went into effect, marking a major shift for data collection in the United States. Similar legislation (GDPR) was enacted in the EU in 2018, to much hubbub. Essentially, the new laws both in California and in the EU address the use of personal data, basically requiring enterprises to explicitly get consent from consumers to collect, use and sell personally identifiable data. Plus, residents in areas where these legislations apply have greater access to their data that’s been collected and can request the deletion of any personal data records collected.
For companies built on hyper-targeted digital marketing practices, the implications are vast. Consumers will begin to opt-out of data collection, or at the very least become much more aware of policies and services to which they consent. Regulators will be on careful watch to be sure that big data companies are compliant, issuing massive fines to those who aren’t. And data breaches will transition from being a change-your-password headache to having huge consequences on a legislative level.
So, as the marketing lead of a company in this space, I’ve been thinking plenty about what something like the CCPA means for advertising. While some companies are impacted more than others, we’ll see major shifts across the board which, in my opinion, will lead to a back-to-basics mentality. We may not be building a time machine out of a DeLorean, but here are some predictions I foresee for digital marketing companies in the wake of the CCPA.
Publisher-Owned Data
Will it finally be time for media companies to re-emerge as humongo marketing power-houses rather than struggling-to-keep-up legacy brands? My prediction is a big fat yes. Look at the innovation coming out of Vox. They announced just a few days ago that they’ll be launching “Forte” which will cut out the middleman, allowing advertisers to capitalize on Vox’s first-party audience data. The monetization opportunities here are huge, and the advertising impact could mean publishers shifting to managing their own ad inventory and reader data rather than using third parties to do so. Plus, with third-party data suppliers, ad networks or trading desks having to rely on publishers to lead the charge in getting readers to comply with opt-in settings, it makes sense that publishers would start to own and monetize that audience more directly.
Back to Personas
Personalization has been a hot topic in the marketing world for the past couple of years, with thousands of data points about a cookied user getting fed into a DMP for DSPs to gobble up. A complex profile of a single user can be created, including locations they’ve visited, past purchases they’ve made, credit cards they have and more. But in a world where data is more protected and consumers get more savvy, it’s likely that the industry will be forced to shift (potentially due to consumer demand) away from hyper-targeted messaging. Instead, marketers will return to a persona model, building out more broad characterizations of their buyer. This, again, will put the ball back in the publisher’s court. Bon Appetit, for example, can tout their millennial foodie audience rather than serve programmatic display ads to whomever comes to their site.
Influencers Moving Back to Blogs
This one feels like my most “out there” prediction, but hear me out: with the power put back on the publisher, smart startup-minded publishers will shift back to publishing content on websites and blogs. Sure, we’ll still have tons of Instagram fashion influencers, but for those influencers looking to make the jump from the occasional spon con on their feed to media mogul status, they’ll need (and want) to build up a first-party proprietary audience--read: one not owned by Facebook.
Contextual Dominance
Sure, I may be biased, but as a long-term employee of Chicory, I’m stoked to see the re-emergence of contextual advertising as a formidable marketing solution. We’ve seen the shift begin to happen already: programmatic was all anyone could talk about when we launched our advertising solutions in 2015, but since then, there’s been a slow and steady shift back to thinking about contextual as a real option. And, no, this isn’t the contextual of fifteen years ago. When we started our in-recipe ads, we noted countless examples of chicken companies serving ads on Ricky’s Halloween site alongside a chicken costume. Contextual providers will need to get smarter and consider the environments they’re serving in--for us, it’s serving ads for chicken solely within recipes that call for chicken. That’s the kind of no-brainer innovation that would make Doc Brown proud.