Despite much pressure from the media industry on Wednesday, Google showed its commitment to a privacy-first web that protects the rights of the consumer. We could not be more pleased for these are the principles upon which we have built Skyrise Intelligence. Our mission since day one is to harness the power of mobile data to deliver amazing marketing in a privacy-first way. To have the most powerful marketing data without impinging on people’s rights to privacy. We are now in the privacy-first era and Google’s announcement along with the moves of Apple (the other major browser and app environment owner) as well as the emerging global privacy regulatory environment completely validates our mission.
Looking at Google’s announcement consider the following statements;
“We don’t believe these solutions (new IDs) will meet rising consumer expectations for privacy, nor will they stand up to rapidly evolving regulatory restrictions, and therefore aren’t a sustainable long term investment.”
“Instead, our web products will be powered by privacy-preserving APIs which prevent individual tracking while still delivering results for advertisers and publishers.”
These completely mirror how we have setup Skyrise where advanced audience profiling is done behind the firewall of the mobile network operator before being aggregated into time and location clusters in a privacy and legally compliant manner.
Some companies are already talking about how they will continue to use IDs outside of Google’s platforms. That this gives them a competitive advantage. Surely this is the wrong approach! Google and Apple have both been explicit in not supporting fingerprinting or a replacement ID. It also flies in the face of moves from the regulators. The direction of travel is clear, we must move to a world where most advertising is done without the need for individual data.
Aside from the legal, technical and moral implications, there is also the aspect of what is right for marketing. Customer marketing clearly needs a 1:1 relationship, which through logged in environments can be maintained in this new era. However, prospecting and brand marketing have always been about finding groups of people and communicating with them about your products or service. This again is what Skyrise is built to do, to find those clusters (cohorts) of people who are in market or in your target audience. Because we are doing this from such a rich data source we have that ideal combination of privacy preserving methodology but also predictive power. Crucially the data we can produce can be applied in all media environments from Google ads (search, display, social) and Facebook Audience Network (which together power 60% of all online marketing) to Connected TV, Digital Out of Home and of course display.
Marketing performance can thrive in this environment. We have been running campaigns in this manner since our inception and have consistently seen performance above that which can be produced with cookies and other IDs. Such clusters when powered by awesome data and delivery techniques are incredibly powerful and actually bring marketing back to its roots of trying to find an audience rather than a collection of individual IDs.
Advertisers fear not. The future of data driven targeting is bright, and along the way, we can restore the trust of the consumer in marketing and advertising and better help advertiser grow whilst looking after consumers interests.
