What Marketers and Consumers Need to Know About Privacy, Security, and Cookieless Advertising

Host (00:00):

Hi Jodi Daniels here. I’m the founder and CEO of Red Clover advisors, a certified women’s privacy consultancy. I’m a privacy consultant and a certified informational privacy professional. And I provide practical privacy advice to overwhelmed companies.

Host (00:20):

Hi, Justin Daniels here, I am passionate about helping companies solve complex cyber and privacy challenges during the life cycle of their business. I do that through identifying the problem and coming up with practicable implementable solutions. I am a cyber security subject matter expert and business attorney.

Host (00:40):

And this episode is brought to you by Red Clover Advisors. We help companies to comply with data privacy laws and establish customer trust so that they can grow and nurture integrity. We work with companies in a variety of fields, including technology, SAS, e-commerce digital agencies, professional and financial services. In short, we use data privacy to transform the way companies do business together. We’re creating a future where there is greater trust between companies and consumers to learn more, visit redcloveradvisors.com. And today I am so excited to welcome Andrew Richardson, who is the SVP of analytics and marketing sciences at Tinuity, which is the nation’s largest independent digital marketing agency across the triopoly of Amazon, Facebook and Google. Andrew, welcome to the show.

Andrew Richardson (01:36):

Thank You so much. So happy to be here.

Host (01:38):

Well, we are delighted now, before we dive into all things, privacy and security and digital advertising, help us understand who is Andrew. So tell us a little bit about how did you find your way to the worlds of digital and at tenuity?

Andrew Richardson (01:56):

Uh, I’ll go way back. I actually used to be a women’s volleyball coach at university of Notre Dame and at U Penn. And when I stopped doing that I realized that the things that I loved about coaching were actually the numbers and the people. And so I transitioned over and found a great company, worked at the college board for a while and did some educational analytics and had a really great time there and moved my way into digital marketing by way of a local user group in Philadelphia for the software that I was using at the time called Tableau, which is a great partner of ours. And really just kind of fell in love with this stream of information that was headed my way when I was an analyst and the ability to take that information and do something with it that actually made sense as opposed to just looking at numbers on a, on a page.

Andrew Richardson (02:51):

And that was kinda my first foray into digital marketing, did a little bit of a work when I was the college board around some of Google analytics, which was relatively new at the time and some of their web data, but from there kind of made my way through the ad tech ecosystem working at places like point roll and did some pharmaceutical marketing, a place called CMI some more web design and tracking at a place called Delphic digital, which is now owned by hero now at tinuity, which used to be elite SCM where we’re doing a whole slew of different things. So you mentioned the Triopily obviously, but our teams do a lot more with web analytics and data implementation, as well as a lot of work in marketing sciences, and trying to just take, you know, the money that our brands are spending with us and putting them to their best use possible. So yeah, that’s kinda my background

Host (03:52):

Really fascinating career starting all the way in volleyball who would have thought counting and the measurement from sports would land you to measuring Facebook and Google.

Andrew Richardson (04:05):

Exactly. I know. Right. Never, never would have thought. I remember when I was at U Penn, Facebook just had been coming out and now to see, Oh, you can’t log in, unless you have a.edu email address to now being what it is kind of, kind of nuts.

Host (04:21):

So on that stream help us, you know, you’ve seen a lot over this period of time from, you know, obviously we’re going to be talking a lot about privacy and security, but kind of think about the evolution of the advertising ecosystem from that personal data. So maybe help explain where we were and where do we find ourselves today?

Andrew Richardson (04:44):

Yeah, I think the, where we were, if you remember I vividly remember seeing these ads where you would get, like the clapping monkey were like those were ads, right? Those were, were digital advertisements where someone was trying to get your attention. You would end up with the flashing number advertisements. Usually none of those had anything to do with anything that you actually cared about You know, if you were 25 year old you know, recent college grad working a $30,000 a year job, you didn’t really care about mortgage rates. Those were flashing in your face, quite a bit, and trying to get you to refinance your mortgage. And so going back from kind of the spray and pray, so to speak, let’s throw as much spaghetti against the wall and get as much reach as we can was kind of the mentality.

Andrew Richardson (05:36):

I think, of old, you know, broadcast media where we knew kind of what the demographic was of people in certain markets, based off of market research. And we would then go out and try and just advertise to as many people within those different markets as possible. Um, now obviously with the rise of so much data collection, I think the pixel in general and its development and what you’ve been able to do with a very simple piece of technology really at its core as has obviously transformed into being able to do a lot more than just, uh, you know, clapping monkeys and flashing numbers on a page from a display advertising perspective you know, being able to move into having compelling creative that, you know, as we talk about hit someone at the right place at the right time with the right message it’s been quite a transformation and now obviously looking towards the future and the deprecation of cookies and how are we going to measure the things that we’ve been able to measure for so long? And what does it mean? And, um, obviously with privacy being at the forefront of that, and I think it’s just been a big shift from the, my early days of, of advertising and what we were doing.

Host (06:58):

This is the longest I’ve gone on a podcast without first speaking. It was an interesting experience. So when I heard volleyball, I thought we should have a sign that says Wilson in the back. I’m thinking what we’re getting prepared to talk about. We should call this the cookie monster episode. Well, chocolate chip cookies are my favorite food, but kind of breaking back into segwaying into our next topic is obviously in the last year, year and a half, especially with the advent of CCPA, as you talked about, privacy is really coming to the forefront and that has a potential tremendous impact on how advertising is done because it’s so successful because it can be so highly targeted. So with that context in mind, could you talk a little bit about the challenges that you are seeing with brands advertising in this new privacy environment that we find ourselves in?

Andrew Richardson (08:00):

Yeah, I think first and foremost is I think about the changes that have been happening and even some of the ones that, you know, we’re on the precipice of depending on when, you know, the IDFA changes happen on the Apple side and with Facebook and everything within the app ecosystem. I think there’s a few things that come to mind. One is brands that have not invested in data privacy components within their business that really care about first party data for their consumers and keeping it secure, but also then using it to ensure that kind of what consumers are used to doesn’t go back to, you know, clapping circus monkeys is not lost the, the folks that are not investing in that first party data, infrastructure and architecture, and really learning who their customers are, not as in an opportunistic way, but really to, to talk about the, the give and take of learning who you are as a customer.

Andrew Richardson (09:02):

I think that we’ve been pushing a lot of our brands in that direction. That first party data is King. We’ve all relied in the marketing world, on third-party data for a long time on being able to, you know, track and pixel everything. And with those things being less and less, that first party data, and what you know about your consumers is paramount. So that’s one thing. The other piece is just around measurement, right? We’ve gotten so used to being able to measure down in some cases to an individual and that changes and goes back to some of the ways that we used to have to do things which is much more modeling, enabled. It’s much more about looking at things like media mix modeling or marketing mix modeling and leveraging those types of tools and platforms as opposed to attribution modeling still important, but now becomes a lot more modeled data as opposed to one, one to one data.

Andrew Richardson (09:58):

So those are some, some big changes that I think that I’ve seen in some conversations we’ve been having with our clients around how they need to be prepared for this. And I think also brands that are privacy centric and let their consumers know that is an important and important point, right? If we, as, as marketers care about data, as much as we do it to Tinuiti but care about privacy even more. So we should be letting people know that. And if you’re a brand who’s in that same boat and you want to know that if I’m a customer of yours, that my data is secure, that’s important to me. I want to make sure that I’m communicating that if I’m a brand to my customers,

Host (10:40):

So many interesting nuggets and everything that you just shared, let’s help explain the cookie lists and kind of this new frontier that we’re expecting to have. Can you explain what that is when we think it might really make a splash and an impact, and then what should companies be doing? So you kind of had talked about first party data. What might be some tactical suggestions, maybe a company hasn’t been focused on that as much what they should be doing now?

Andrew Richardson (11:13):

Yeah, I think that a couple of things that I would highlight one from just to, to orient people a cookie, right. And what is a cookie is really just a small text file that sits in the browser that then websites can write data to you know, sometimes it’s specific to a device or it is specific to a device and cookies have been around since the mid nineties really. And the initial goal of those was kind of improving the e-commerce experience. There’s different types of cookies. So first party cookies would be ones that are kind of created and published and controlled by the website that you visit. And with things like, I remember what was in your shopping cart, and I know what items you viewed and different preferences that kind of improve the user experience within, you know, working with that brand, right.

Andrew Richardson (12:05):

They get that behavioral data to help kind of the web website owner improved services. And it only goes back to the owner of that domain. So first party cookies and the data collected only go back to the brand. And what you’re, you’re engaging with third-party cookies are ones that are set by third-party servers, ad technology, um, usually is where we think about this. So that’s a code, a, another piece of code that’s placed on the web domain by the owner of that domain. But the data that’s collected there is accessible on any website that loads, that third party servers code. So that allows advertisers to track users across the internet, uh, and kind of target advertising wherever that user goes. Right. So thinking of cookies in that way within the e-commerce landscape, I think is probably the most applicable way to think about this.

Andrew Richardson (12:59):

We obviously use them for ad targeting. You would come visit brand.com. You look at a specific let’s say, pair of shoes, and then, you know, hours or days later, you’re getting re-targeted with an advertisement about that brand or about those shoes, right? That information is going away specifically as it pertains to third-party cookies and their ability to be able to still leverage that data, to do those things. So from an impact perspective, and when it happens we know that in 2021, that this is going to happen. The exact dates of certain things are still yet to be determined. Like I mentioned, there’s things happening in the Apple ecosystem with Safari and with some of the ways that they’re tracking apps, Facebook is changing some of the ways that they actually do like the attribution of marketing as a result of some of this.

Andrew Richardson (13:56):

But there is a lot of shakeup that’s going to come. If you’re a marketer who’s used to relying on retargeting for people that have come to your website and leveraging those third-party cookies as a result of that, some browsers that are already out there brave for Firefox Safari, they already block a lot of the third party cookies. And Chrome has actually also announced that they’re deprecating third-party cookies this year. That change on the Chrome side, because chromium specifically is the underlying technology of Chrome, um, is the largest reach of any of the web browsers out there that will make a massive, massive dent within the industry and third-party cookies in that result. Um, so yeah,

Host (14:42):

So you talked about all this being a by-product of a shakeup, and when you mean shakeup, I interpreted that to mean a lot of what’s going on in Washington, DC, from the Democrats and Republicans, and what’s gone on with big tech. Is that what you’re referring to, or can you kind of give us some further color about that?

Andrew Richardson (15:05):

I think for me, this goes back actually to the fallout of the Cambridge Analytica kind of data conference controversy. I go back then a little more recently to GDPR in Europe and CCPA in California. In just the legislation that has now started to come to the forefront all of the antitrust kind of aside, I think this started before that but it started to bring that more and more because of the antitrust hearings to the forefront of a lot more kind of everyday consumers minds. I think that it’s good for consumers and for companies that this is happening. I’m I am consumer focused, even though I work for a marketing technology marketing company. We know at Tinuiti how important consumer privacy is. And, um, but I think this is a good thing. It’s just a big shakeup for how, since the nineties effectively the advertising ecosystem has operated. And some of the things that folks in marketing are used to being able to do changes as a result,

Host (16:13):

How do you see consumer habits changing? And you had mentioned that you see a lot of consumer privacy focused brands that you’re working with all the time. What do you see kind of between the consumer focused brands, right? Why do they put privacy first and how does that connect with the consumer habits in any changes that you’re starting to see?

Andrew Richardson (16:37):

The way that I think about this is that for many, um, for many consumers and there’s research out there that’s, that’s been done on this. I think when we started to see newspapers digitally needing to charge for subscriptions, but then people thinking about what alternatives are there to charging for subscriptions. Well, would you give me some of your personal information so that then I can give you this thing for free? I think that there’s always that play of give and take with, with privacy and with personal data to how much you’re willing to give up for getting something in return. And we think about that. Let’s just think about location, right, is a very real one today where browsers are asking to know your location apps on your phone are asking to know your location, and depending on how much you want to give up or not.

Andrew Richardson (17:25):

I think it really depends on from a marketing lens. What is the give that I’m giving back to consumers in order to take something from them from from their personal what they may consider private data. So I think that the top marketers out there are really trying to explain what the value is of some of these things. Even just go into things like cookie consent banners, right on websites, you see a lot more of them getting a lot more detailed, because I think when GDPR first happened specifically, they were pretty sparse cookies. Yes or no. Here’s why maybe a privacy control center, if you were lucky. But now they’re, they’re getting a lot more detailed because I think they’ve seen a drop off in a lot of that data. And they’re saying, well, we have some necessary cookies. Are you okay if we just have the necessary cookies? Yes or no advertising cookies, do you want the, like, they’re giving users a lot more choice and a lot more information to determine is my personal information and data valuable enough to give away for what I get in return. Great. Marketers are making that a focal point. You give me this, I give you that, right. It’s not just, I expect you to give me everything and you get nothing in return.

Host (18:39):

Makes sense. You know, it’s interesting that we bring up these points. You talk about geolocation because Jodi convinced me to get a new car. Last year, I got to tell your ride. And I actually turned off the function on my phone, that geo locates me. So then my car was so kind to say, Hey, you know, the Apple maps function will do better if you turn this on. And I’m like, no. So I think I’m good. But then of course, Kia has a map on my car that shows exactly where I’m going because of the sensors. And then his Jodi’s going to laugh in a minute in San Diego. They have drones that fly up in the sky that are monitoring where traffic and whatnot is going. And so I’m sharing this story in a way, because all of those different forms of geolocation impact our privacy. And so I’d love to get your take on how you see companies in your space and your customers dealing with privacy, because it comes in so many different forms. Now with all of the data that’s out there, that’s being collected by all these different devices. Love to get your take on that.

Andrew Richardson (19:52):

Yeah. Just a quick aside, I was at a conference, this was not obviously pre COVID, so it was probably two years ago now. One of the speakers was a the head of data for one of the, the top five car manufacturers in the country. They were collecting more data in a day, in a day because of all of the different sensors and devices, like you just mentioned that are in automobiles. Then they had collected as an entire company in the previous, like 15 years, right. One day, 15 years. And so I bring that up and you were talking about cars because I think that oftentimes consumers don’t really understand how much is being tracked about them. I don’t know that they understand what the implications are of them being tracked or not being tracked. Again, Apple maps does better tracking you. If you’re looking for GPS directions, you should turn it on. If you actually want to know where you’re going, there’s a very clear give and take there. What may not be understood. Um, pre some of the changes that are happening within the app ecosystem is, is there additional data that is being tracked as a part of this, not just you have my locations, so that then you can tell me where I need to go, but what additional information and data are you actually collecting and using this for? So going back to my point of marketers are need to be very clear about what they do with this data beyond just, it gives you a personalized web experience, quote, unquote, I feel like that’s a generic statement that you see in a lot of cookie consent banners is in order to give you the most personalized experience, you should enable everything that I’m asking you to enable.

Andrew Richardson (21:37):

That can be fine for some brands, but not for others. And so I think that, um, in order for brands to really be considered privacy focused, it can’t just be about our data centers are, you know, this and we care about consumer privacy. They really need to be explaining what that means to them. Well, what did, what is my data privacy worth? What are you doing with that data? What are you not doing with that data? And can’t give away trade secrets, obviously, but the ability to still track users, but with their consent and explain what they’re getting as a result of being able to track this data, um, is important. I also think on the flip side of that to a degree because of how much we’ve had users or how much consumers are used to being tracked, when some of this tracking goes away, we’re going to end up with a worse experience as consumers.

Andrew Richardson (22:27):

And I don’t think we understand what that means either. Um, some people may not care, but one that I can tell you for me is, is, uh, impactful. This just happened to me a couple of weeks ago. I was on a website. I was browsing for some clothing items, added them to my cart, didn’t sign in on the website, but added them to my cart. And I use a browser that anytime I leave after there’s an activity, it clears my cache. I went back to the website. Those items were no longer in my cart. And I was like, what the heck? These things aren’t in my cart anymore. I don’t understand. Well that’s of course what would happen? Like the data was no longer being collected because I had expired at the time window. Hadn’t expired. The like these items can only stay in your car for two hours because they might go out of stock. This was an entirely different thing. And so I think that we’re going to see some of that at the same time where, yeah, I’m not going to get the same user experience. I think my conversion rates, if I’m a marketer will probably go down as a result of not being able to make, you know, frictionless conversion paths, so to speak for, for consumers. And it’s going to be an interesting thing to navigate along the way.

Host (23:35):

So it’s funny, you said that. So in another way, you’re saying as we rebalanced towards more privacy and respecting it, how inefficiency are we willing to put up with? Because in my experience, when it comes to having the best experience or the most efficiency with technology, it beats the pants off of privacy and security every time. And now you’re really talking about rebalancing that Seesaw.

Andrew Richardson (24:02):

Yeah. You’re, you’re exactly correct. And how far it balances, like that’s the one thing it’s there, there’s no relative measure to how far out of balance we are right now. Right. It’s just been a constant thing where we’ve gone up and up and up and up. And there is, what’s the diminishing return point here that we actually see. We don’t know. So let’s say a lot of companies I’ll use it as an example. They rely on abandoned cart emails, right. That doesn’t necessarily go away because that’s a logged in experience. And so if you’re a logged in consumer, you still have that. But to your point, if I want to be not inconvenienced, I may want to be able to say, yep, I’m going to just go ahead and turn on that. You can track me for this stuff because the lack of convenience is actually worth it for me. That’s part of the give and take that I was talking about.

Host (24:55):

There are some brands out there that have figured out how to do abandoned cart emails without being logged in, because I know that they are relying on my cookies and I was not logged in to buy the item. And yet I, one hour later did not buy the XYZ item. We’re going to be very kind to this brand when I know who they are, big well-known brand. And they’re always targeting me to keep buying whatever it is. I did not choose to buy at that time. Um, but you had mentioned something really interesting around how marketers need to consider these privacy items. You know, when they’re explaining to consumers. And one of the questions I’m always asked is where does privacy sit, who owns privacy? Who’s responsible for privacy when you’re working with clients, who do you tend to, to discuss these types of privacy items with, is it marketers? Do their privacy teams get involved or are they lawyers? Are they, you know, business people? It would be interesting to hear, I think for people to understand where privacy sits amongst companies.

Andrew Richardson (25:57):

For us at Tinuiti it varies. And I say that because we work with clients that are small and medium business, and we work with clients that are fortune 100 companies. And so it varies to a, to an extent there I’ll give that caveat in the, in the companies that are fortune 100, they have privacy teams, right? That are focused on thinking about marketing and privacy they’re in, they are very closely tied with or have on those teams, legal folks as well that are talking through the implications of different things that happen within the way they collect data, their website operations, how they are in compliance with GDPR CCPA regulations. So it can vary there. The majority of the conversations we have are with, um, with marketers and, and the way that I think about this is actually a little different than pre GDPR world, where pre GDPR, you would go and talk to a client about privacy, and you would kind of get the like eyes glazed over look because, well, like there was no regulation that said I had to do something here with the exception of email, right.

Andrew Richardson (27:11):

CAN spam and all of those types of things that came along. Now I see more and more on the rise of, of companies either building or outsourcing to be able to have privacy groups within their org right now, I think a lot of that responsibility sits within marketing. This is where we are collecting the data, right? It’s not IT it’s not InfoSec that has a play into what we’re talking about. But I think that the, the marketing privacy is in many ways, especially at large brands, very, very different than how their InfoSec or it teams are thinking they will not have the working understanding of the way that the technologies work or how the data is being collected. And oftentimes frankly, the marketers don’t know that either they’ve bought a tool because it solves the problem, but they don’t understand all of the things that are happening.

Andrew Richardson (28:02):

There was a great, um, a great article recently that came out from Ghostery, um, and Ghostery does their tracking the trackers thing every single year. And I encourage everyone to go take a look at that because it’s a really fascinating look at to which brands from a third-party perspective are tracking the most. Where do you see the most cookies and pixels? Um, and it’s the AAA, right? It’s Amazon and Facebook and Google, but then you end up with, um, you know, Twitter and you see Microsoft and comScore and CloudFare and Adobe and Critio, and you look at that and some people might say, I’ve never, what, what is a Critio right. Like, I don’t even know what that is. ComScore, I feel like I may have heard that, but I don’t know what it is either. So I think that, that it really, we rely on the marketers to, to have this understanding, but oftentimes they don’t, they are just trying to solve a problem with a tool or a solution or a cookie in whatever case it is.

Andrew Richardson (28:59):

So I think that there’s a lot of responsibility that falls on them. I will also say working at you know, technology enable enabled marketing services company or agency, like we are, it’s our responsibility to do a lot of that education. If you were to go to our website and just search for privacy or cookie, you’ll see a lot of educational materials that we’ve put out for our brands and for the market in general, because we think that privacy is hugely, hugely important to the success of our brands. We care about, like I said, earlier, consumers and their privacy. And so, um, there’s still a gap though. There there’s definitely still a gap in what exists within a lot of brands and their understanding of, of data privacy and what they need to do about it. Who’s ultimately responsible for making sure that they’re all compliant.

Host (29:51):

I love the reference to the Ghostery report. And if anyone has also not already downloaded, Ghostery has an amazing plugin that you can put on your browser and you can see, you can kind of have it set up to auto block or allow, but then you can choose and you can see all the trackers that are happening on a site at that time. It’s a, it’s a free, really great plugin. So I highly recommend that you, you grab that. Well, I think we could talk for hours on all kinds of topics. So, um, we kind of always ask everyone, given everything you’ve learned from the knowledge that you have in a privacy and security sense, what’s the best privacy tip that you would offer our listeners

Host (30:34):

Best privacy Tip, to offer your listeners? I think the number one thing that I would probably say is I recently, did this go through your phone and take a look at the apps that you have on there and go through each of them to see if you’ve got certain data collection components turned on or not. The location. One is one for me that I turn off every single location piece that I possibly can because I don’t feel like I need that to happen as part of the apps that I work in where I need location. I have it enabled where I don’t, I don’t. So that’s probably probably one of the biggest ones for me, because again, you don’t know what you don’t know. And so we’re making assumptions that just because we have an app, there’s certain data that’s going to be passed back. It could be more than what you think. So I definitely would take a look at that.

Host (31:25):

Great tip. Good reminder.

Host (31:27):

So our last question, but not least is what do you like to do for fun besides coach sports?

Andrew Richardson (31:35):

So I don’t coach sports anymore, which is a whole different conversation for another time. Still loves sports. I live in Philadelphia I’m a big Eagles and Sixers and a Phillies fan. Uh, I’ve got two kids, one in high school and one getting ready to go into middle school this next year and my wife. And so we spent a lot of time together, especially during COVID. We have played a whole heck of a lot of UNO last year, literally every single day from like March to June, probably we would be playing UNO after dinner every single day. So that was a lot of fun. We have not picked up UNO in quite a while because I got a little bit to be a little bit too much. But we love board games and games in general. And so we spend a lot of time, a lot of time together doing that. It’s a, it’s a really interesting question in the midst of this pandemic because the pre pandemic answers are going to be completely different. I feel like for anyone who answers that question than where we currently sit.

Host (32:32):

Well, you know, some people got dogs and COVID, we started a podcast. So I guess when we get out of the pandemic, it’ll be interesting to compare the answers will come to you for some analytical help. I love it. I love it. Well, Andrew, thank you so much for your time. Where can people connect with you to learn more and stay in touch?

Andrew Richardson (32:50):

Yeah, so LinkedIn, obviously Andrew Richardson, I think on there it’s analytic Andrew, which is actually also my Twitter handle. And then through our website, uh, check us out tinuiti.com T I N U I T I, and we’d love to have conversations with you all. If you’re a brand that’s, you know, looking for some help because we know this is not an easy thing to navigate.

Host (33:16):

Well. Wonderful. Thank you so much for sharing your expertise with us today. It was a really fascinating discussion and we appreciate it.

Andrew Richardson (33:22):

Thank you guys. Appreciate the time.