“Hey Ms. Consumer, you get email, search, maps, friendship interaction and voice-activated homes for free! How good is that? Just don’t look at the pipe at the back of your house pumping terabytes of data back to Northern California.”
This quote was from a fascinating Mark Ritson editorial a few weeks ago in MarketingWeek. Mark wrote about the recent data privacy awakening as “the biggest question our [marketing] discipline has faced in decades.”
We’re in an interesting stage where data-driven technology is increasingly ubiquitous and accepted. In one example, a recent Jupiter report predicted voice-enabled smart speakers to reach 55% of US households by 2022. And yet there’s heightened attention into how that data is used. We’re just a month away from the May 25th deadline of The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the EU.
There has been a steady marketing drumbeat toward personalized, targeted advertising and yet 55% of adults in a recent UK study from YouGov hate the idea of personalized, targeted advertising.
It will be interesting to see how marketing teams navigate the tension between wanting to deliver the right message to the right audience at the right time, and the growing sensitivities around the data used to make that happen.
Here are a couple related cartoons I’ve drawn over the years:
“The Future of Advertising” November 2017
“Marketing with Virtual Assistants” January 2017
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