For Health Targeting, Choose Privacy First

By Andrew Willis, Co-founder & CFO, Crossix Solutions

When it comes to audience targeting, today’s health marketers have more options than ever before. From programmatic networks to premium publishers, reaching the right audiences has never been more promising… and more complicated. With unprecedented access to digital real estate, marketers have tools to help achieve their goals of reaching the right health consumers, wherever and whenever they consume content.

However, to communicate effectively — and, ultimately, improve health outcomes — marketers need to earn the trust of consumers. The proliferation of data has allowed marketers across all industries to truly understand their target audience and personalize messaging based on their online (and offline) behaviors. Adding in health data creates another level of personalization that can quickly go from being helpful to being perceived as intrusive. Healthcare marketers need to be mindful that there are right ways to enhance the effectiveness of healthcare marketing today, and ways that should be avoided. At Crossix, we support self-regulatory efforts to draw the line.

Protecting the privacy of individuals is part of the Crossix mission. From targeting to measurement and optimization, we help health marketers use data and analytics to improve the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns, while safeguarding consumer privacy.

The Crossix Enhanced-Demo Approach to Targeting

Our targeting solutions are privacy-safe and powerful. Because we are able to see patterns in analyzing massive amounts of information across our data network, Crossix has a better understanding of the consumer profile of potential customers. Leveraging those consumer attributes to build enhanced targeting models improves the likelihood that messaging will reach a relevant audience.

Our audience segments are activated using consumer data across large cohorts of the digital audience — a minimum of 10–25 million US adults per addressable segment.

Using Data Responsibly

For any audience targeting campaign, success starts with the right data. The right data goes beyond achieving campaign goals; it is sourced and used responsibly and is sensitive to the unique concerns of health consumers. In the past year, we’ve seen an increase in questionable claims and approaches in the marketplace that may not adequately protect the privacy of consumers. The great news is that in order to execute truly modern campaigns at scale, healthcare marketers do not need to participate in any of these questionable approaches.

At Crossix, we do not believe that geo-targeting at the 9-digit zip code level based on personal health data is ok. In rural areas of the country, 9-digit zip may target as few as four households. With this limited and precise approach, it’s too easy to re-identify individuals with specific health conditions. At Crossix, we do not believe that executing 1:1 targeting based on health data, with added data noise to “anonymize” the targeting, is ok. Again, we believe this is insufficient from a privacy standpoint, and healthcare data for individuals should not be used to target those individuals.

Compliance with Industry Guidelines

Industry trade groups like the NAI (Network Advertising Initiative) and the DAA (Digital Advertising Alliance) provide useful industry self-regulations to help publishers and advertisers navigate the complex world of digital targeting. Crossix designs its enhanced demographic audience segments in compliance with important privacy legislation like HIPAA, as well as the NAI Code and other self-regulatory guidelines.

• Crossix uses no healthcare data of individuals to target those individuals
• Crossix does not enable online behavioral advertising or retargeting
• Crossix does not infer interest in health conditions (note: NAI code requires opt-in if inferring interest only for sensitive conditions. Similar to targeting to males greater than 45 years old, the Crossix enhanced demo approach allows for a higher probability of relevance of the communication to the audience, but does not infer interest of individuals within the audience.)

When choosing media and data partners, marketers need to lead with privacy. Ask your partners: How many consumers will be targeted by my campaign? What are you doing to ensure consumer privacy? Does this solution comply with regulations and industry guidelines? Does the proposed approach use actual healthcare data to target patients, even if noise is included?

To continue to earn that trust with consumers, marketers need to be diligent about the partners they depend on to disseminate their DTC digital messaging. If you would like to hear more about our privacy-safe approach, let’s talk.