Privacy Talk with Raashee Gupta Erry, Founder and Principal of Uplevel: What do you envision future Advertising and Marketing industry growth and privacy?
“This interview recorded on 9th February 2023 is talking about privacy and digital marketing.”
Kohei is having great time discussing privacy and digital marketing.
This interview outline:
- What should the company do to build trust with privacy?
- What do you envision future Advertising and Marketing industry growth and privacy?
- Message to listeners
- What should the company do to build trust with privacy?
Raashee: The way I approach privacy is that it’s not a legal only function. Yes, it’s about compliance with privacy law. This is the most natural thing that everybody thinks about when it comes to privacy, and by default considered a responsibility to fall under the legal domain or lawyers.Being compliant in all your business practices is certainly number one.
What we’re starting to see is that regulators are definitely more active, and they are proactively going out and looking for companies who are not compliant.
Secondly, there’s a lot of consumer awareness about privacy and consumers are starting to make choices whether they’re opting out from all apps collecting their data or allowing users to or opt out of websites collecting cookies and data.
This means that the businesses do need to become more aware, and they need to start thinking of privacy as a core business value.
And it starts not just at the bottom i.e. compliance and you’re done. It has to be more upstream. It has to be built into the strategy conversations. Marketers and advertisers are very accustomed to thinking about data, they want to have a lot of data at their fingertips so they can do better personalization of customer experiences.
Privacy needs to come into that conversation now. The data strategy has to weave in privacy principles so that if you are collecting data, are you collecting it properly?
Are you collecting with consent? Are you transparent in your privacy policies? Are you doing what you’re saying? And are you being clear and concise about your information and user experience?
Dark patterns hand in hand with privacy. There are a lot of notice banners that are everywhere on every website.
You need to think about user experience to check for — are you misleading consumers by trying to just trick them into accepting all versus giving them equal choice?
Privacy by design, and privacy by default are some core engineering and product principles. That should be built in as you are developing products, as you’re developing destinations and experiences.
And lastly, businesses have to be very open minded and have to be learning and constantly watching because even as the US doesn’t have a federal privacy law, FTC is the federal body which has the authority and the way they are making the point is by doing different enforcement actions.
Hence businesses constantly need to understand and see what’s going on, what sort of actions are being taken. Because even though these are not written in a privacy law, they become case precedent, and start to be used as guidelines.
To summarize, Compliance is the first step. Its the most natural thing you would do. From there on then start to build privacy conversations in all your strategic decisions in your planning, in Product Development, in Engineering, in marketing. Privacy component has to be built into every aspect of the business that has data tied to it. .
Kohei: Thank you. So, I want to ask you about the future landscape because you mentioned that trust is important for the marketing and advertising industry.
And the problem is a lot of the marketing efforts in the past such as the industry or organization creating the standards, such as the IAB is their own trust framework, but unfortunately is controversial in European regulators or whether it could be approved under the GDPR or not.
Of course, it’s the same thing. It’s been discussed underlying the US regulators as well. So do you have any future predictions of privacy or marketing related to the regulatory update in the next decades? Or do you have any concerns or ambitions for those reasons?
- What do you envision future Advertising and Marketing industry growth and privacy?
Raashee: I think the advertising marketing industry, no doubt, is gonna continue to face the pressure that they are facing today with privacy at the core of this. This would be in the form of regulations and a lot of new laws coming up for compliance and actions from regulators.
Industry has had a lot of practices that haven’t been monitored. And that’s what’s happening now, is a lot of these practices are being questioned and regulated-
Marketing industry has a role to play — one, self regulation is really important. Trade bodies are doing a great job and they’re constantly also facing the challenge of new laws and regulations.
Role of industry bodies is to continuously be the voice for self regulation and provide framework and guidance. Second, companies have to also take it upon them to start to build these technologies internally.
There’s a lot of movement amongst privacy enhancing technologies (PETs). Companies need to assess the different viable solutions, different methods of privacy, that could be more in line with the privacy laws, guidelines and privacy principles?
At a high level, companies need to accept these signals as this is now a requirement in law, and this is all done to give consumers choice and to help them exercise their rights.
There’s learning that can be taken from GDPR. But Europe comes from a different standpoint — collect no data. But the United States comes with a perspective of consumer and consumer choice.
So companies need to be mindful when they are collecting data as third party intermediaries or even brands themselves who are using first party data. Every marketer needs to check its practices relating to collecting the data,sharing data, selling data along with privacy principles , data retention, privacy policy, data minimization and others.
Kohei: Thank you. This is the upheaval in the marketing industry at the moment. Then the role of the companies of managers should be changed and their mindset is not just like to push the marketing campaign or something that needs more understanding of the consumers how the trends happen.
So there are very important topics you share. Lastly, could you share any message for the listeners then you have a great experience in a marketing digital advertisement and then you can share this message to the audiences who are interested in this topic.
・Message to listeners
Raashee: My quick message would be, privacy is here to stay. It is time for people, for business owners, for marketers, for advertisers, in addition to privacy and legal professionals, to pause, reflect and almost reset your practices.
You need to see where there’s a gap and make amends. Privacy is an evolving space. So you constantly have to take the time to learn and understand what is coming, what is changing and how you need to adapt to it.
Lastly, do not think privacy is a compliance or legal only function. It should be brought upstream in all of your business decisions and business actions. And it should become a core of your decisioning, of your strategy, part of the planning. You want to do the right thing and again, keeping your brand reputation and customer trust in mind.
Privacy is a long term play. It’s a substantial differentiator that can help businesses benefit in the long run.
Kohei: Great message so thank you, Raashee, having a great time with you. I’m also really exploring what happens in the marketing industry, because it’s very important to take notice of all the marketing suite concerns with privacy first. Let’s keep it updated and then share the insight together. Thank you for having this.
Raashee: Yeah. Thank you for having me. It was great to talk to you.
Kohei: Thank you.
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