When my family and I moved to Connecticut, we had a new home to furnish and no idea where to start. That is, until ads for the perfect home-decor items seemed to serendipitously find me on Instagram.
As marketers, you know how this works: Personalized ads had delivered a relevant experience using data about my online behavior. But with impending changes to browsers and operating systems, and with the changing privacy regulatory landscape, it’s important to acknowledge that digital advertising must evolve to become less reliant on individual third-party data.
I believe this period of change can be a catalyst for long-lasting progress because it will still be possible for brands and products to reach the right people. It will just require us to think a little differently.
Facebook has devised the following five steps to start evolving your data-driven marketing strategies that respect people’s choices around privacy while continuing to enable the best advertising experiences:
- Communicate clearly. With transparent, easy-to-understand policies, you can earn trust and help consumers understand the value in building a relationship with your business through data. Acknowledge and resolve confusion by simplifying where possible and providing more context.
- Lean into machine learning. Technologies like Facebook Dynamic Ads automatically deliver relevant offerings to people based on their interests, intent and actions. And server-to-server integrations like the Conversions API allow you to share key events and actions more reliably.
- Invest in creative iteration. To break through and better understand audiences in a rapidly evolving marketplace, successful brands adopt an agile, test-and-learn approach to creative. Experiment with differentiated formats, creators and external partnerships.
- Embrace new opportunities. The dramatic rise of social commerce allows businesses to reach relevant audiences and deliver seamless, immersive experiences like live shopping, messaging and native checkout contained within social apps.
- Break down silos. Bring together internal brand and performance marketers in collaboration with finance and analytics teams to maximize first-party data within your organization. Break down barriers in measurement as well, with a full-funnel, cross-channel measurement approach that includes privacy-friendly marketing mix modeling (MMM).
The new world of privacy-enhancing technology
Facebook is rebuilding our systems rooted in technology. For example, privacy-enhancing technologies will help us minimize the amount of personal information we process while still allowing us to show people relevant ads and measure ad effectiveness for advertisers.
Take on-device learning, which finds useful patterns in historical data in order to make predictions, all while ensuring people’s individual data remains on their devices. If I were to move again, I’d likely start browsing home-decor blogs and purchasing new furniture items online. Personal data like that would stay on my device while allowing platforms like Facebook to find patterns and make predictions that would help advertisers reach me with relevant ads. Similar to a program like autocorrect or text prediction, on-device learning improves over time.
Facebook is investing in a multi-year effort with academics, global organizations and developers to build solutions and best practices powered by privacy-enhancing technologies like this. It is just the start of a long-term effort and one of many solutions in development. We’ll share more details as they progress.
Personalization and privacy will coexist
Personalized ads are at the heart of fueling meaningful connections between people and businesses of all sizes. Not only is relevant marketing beneficial to consumers, it’s also critical to growth for businesses today. We will give people more data choice while continuing to provide personally relevant experiences. And I know that delivering serendipitous moments of discovery in a way that makes people feel empowered will result in tremendous value for all.
Learn more about our investment and collaborative efforts in privacy-enhancing technologies here.
