The Land Before Facebook
Marketing in the Era of Consumer Privacy Awareness with Lessons from the Past
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a guest post authored by Lauren Karasek, Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer, Seamless Brand Consulting
I’m about to say something shocking, so bare with me: we used to effectively market and sell products before Facebook. And I used to run ads with really good ROI on Facebook before it knew me better than anyone I’ve ever dated. I can feel some of you holding back the urge to criticize my side part and skinny jeans, but I swear to you — there was a time when we found ways other than tracking your every online move to introduce people to products they might like.
Apple caused a “no fair! [feet stomp, sobbing tears]” the likes of which even my parents, who raised and survived eight children, had never heard before when they made tracking for advertising opt-in on iOS 14. Facebook in particular wasn’t completely off base when they claimed that these changes would impact small businesses the most. But hyper-specific, potentially privacy violating ad targeting that causes consumers to wonder if you’re listening to their conversations is not imperative to effectively market your product, and insisting that it is is simply lazy.
It’s the height of hubris to assume that consumers who opt out of your data collection simply don’t know what they’re missing. On the contrary, for more than a decade, consumers have been receiving ads that are poorly targeted, appealing but for products that turn out to be low quality, or just downright freaking them out. It’s not marketers’ god-given right to use a shocking ton of your data and it’s not platforms’ right to sell it, as Apple made clear with their recent change.
It’s possible the tide of opt-outs could have been stemmed with better ad quality features on social media platforms. While Facebook focused on making sure that images weren’t text-heavy and ad text didn’t include targeting information, Google AdWords assigns a Quality Score to three components of search ads. If the text of an ad on Google diverges significantly from the destination landing page or the keywords targeted, Google lets the advertiser know that the ad is unlikely to perform well, and disadvantages it on behalf of consumers. Google also allows advertisers to display star ratings from reputable review websites with a simple extension in their ads. None of these quality checks or consumer confidence builders are available for advertising on major social media platforms.
But we marketing types are also letting out a collective wallow that our jobs just got harder, and I have to suggest that those who earnestly feel that way should have a serious conversation with themselves about how much strategic counsel they were actually providing up to this point. Afterall, there are still plenty of ways to identify and target key audiences on social media platforms. All of the information that users provide to the platform itself, from gender to visited locations to interests, are all still there. By opting out, consumers are telling us they don’t want to be tracked from app to app, which means that your targeting based on that data may very well have been giving them an ick vibe anyway. Even if it wasn’t, we have to respect a consumer’s right to say no.
Maybe your most effective social ad targeting did disappear. But testing, learning and finding new places and ways to reach your consumers has been at the heart of effective marketing strategy since long before Facebook. If it isn’t part of your approach today, with all due respect, what are you doing here? A not-at-all-exhaustive list of options we evaluate when creating a marketing strategy: multiple paid social media platforms and targeting options, strong organic social media content, partnerships with brands and influencers with overlapping affinities, email and SMS marketing, display advertising, native advertising, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, media relations, speaking engagements, events both online and off, activations and guerrilla marketing stunts both online and off, streaming advertising, traditional television, print and out of home advertising…
The list is nearly endless, it’s ever-changing, and so are the budget options within it. If consumers exercising their right to control how their data is collected and used leaves you at a dead end, I’m not sure you were having enough fun with strategy in the first place.
If you don’t think your marketing strategy is resilient to the changing privacy landscape, drop me a line: lauren@seamlessbrandconsulting.com
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