What is Privacy-First Marketing?

Privacy-first marketing can be a confusing mix of terminology, rules, and regulations. We've put together a selection of FAQs and a comprehensive reading list to give you the knowledge and confidence you need to speak about Privacy-first marketing in the workplace.

What is Privacy-First Marketing?

Privacy-first marketing is the proper handling and security of all sensitive data in regard to your marketing activity. This often includes but is not limited to personal details such as email addresses, contact numbers, and financial information. It’s important that as marketers we’re treating this data with the respect it deserves. It’s not just an important part of building trust with consumers, but if handled incorrectly, it can land you some hefty fines – turning the most profitable campaigns on their heads.

FAQs

What are third-party cookies?

A third-party cookie is placed on a website by someone other than the owner (a third party) and collects user data for the third party. As with standard cookies, third-party cookies are placed so that a site can remember something about the user at a later time.

What are first-party cookies?

First-party cookies are directly stored by the website (or domain) you visit. These cookies allow website owners to collect analytics data, remember language settings, and perform other useful functions that provide a good user experience.

What is an IDFA?

The Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA) is a random identifier assigned by Apple to a user’s device. Advertisers use this to track data so they can deliver customised advertising. The IDFA is used for tracking and identifying a user without revealing personal information.

What is contextual targeting?

Contextual targeting is a process of matching adverts with relevant websites in Google’s Display Network. Google Ads does this by analysing the content of each webpage to determine its central theme, before matching these to associated keywords on your ad group.

What is Google’s Privacy Sandbox?

Google’s Privacy Sandbox is a new way of measuring and analysing adverts without the use of third-party cookies. Instead, it uses a series of five APIs to gather anonymised signals within a user’s Chrome browser to report on metrics like conversion and attribution.

What is Apple’s iOS 14 update?

In June 2020, Apple’s iOS 14 update included a feature called App Tracking Transparency. This update to their operating system gave Apple users the ability to decide whether to allow apps to collect data about them across other apps and websites.

What is Google Analytics 4?

Google Analytics 4 is the new generation of Google Analytics, offering different reports and functionality than Universal Analytics. While UA only supports websites, GA4 can be used for websites, apps, and both together. In the future, it is slated to include advanced machine learning to fill in data gaps and preserve campaign insights.

What is GDPR?

The General Data Protection Regulation is a set of data protection rules that limits what personal information organisations can collect about users, and how they can process this data. It also allows consumers to access information on them held by third parties, and request its erasure.

What is the ePrivacy Regulation?

The ePrivacy Regulation controls the use of electronic communications services within the European Union, including the processing of personal data. Intended to replace the Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications, ePR was intended to come into effect with GDPR on 25 May 2018, but is still being finalised.

What is a walled garden?

A walled garden is a closed online environment that keeps its technology, information and user data to itself, with the aim of keeping users on a certain website or app. This encourages them to spend money within the walled environment instead of with a competitor. Facebook and Amazon are examples of organisations that prefer to keep as much data to themselves as possible.

What is a data clean room?

A data clean room is a place where walled gardens (explained above) share aggregated data with advertisers. First-party data collected by the advertiser is then compared with the aggregated data to determine the effectiveness of a campaign. Data clean rooms have extremely strict privacy controls and don’t allow advertisers to view customer-level data.

What is Google’s Consent Mode?

Consent Mode is a control within Google Ads that allows advertisers to adjust how their Google tags behave based on the consent status of their users. If users have consented to ads and cookies, Google’s tags will adapt automatically to only use cookies for the express purpose a user has consented to.

 

Reading List

General

• Google – The Marketer’s Playbook for Navigating Today’s Privacy Environment
• Centro – Identity Crisis: Embracing the Future of Privacy
• McKinsey – The Big Data Reset: Data Driven Marketing in the Next Normal 

3rd Party Cookies

• McKinsey – The Demise of Third Party Cookies & Identifiers
• Campaign Live – Epsilon & The Trade Desk Partner to Preserve Targeting as Cookies Disappear 
• Centro – Identity Crisis: Embracing the Future of Privacy 
• Behind the Numbers Podcast – The Ad Platform: Testing Cookieless Targeting with Safari & Firefox Traffic 
• LeadsBridge – Data Resiliency: Cookies & Browser-Based Tracking is Dying
• HubSpot – The Death of the Third-Party Cookie: What Marketers Need to Know about Google’s Looming Privacy Pivot 
• eConsultancy – How to Measure Marketing in a World without Cookie-Tracking 

Cookie Consent

• Smashing Magazine: State of GDPR in 2021: Cookie Consent for Designers & Developers 

FLoC

• Google – Charting a Course Towards a more Privacy-First Web 
• Google – Privacy First Web Advertising: a Measurement Update
• VOX – Google is Done with Cookies, but that Doesn’t Mean it’s Done Tracking You 
• The Verge – Nobody is Flying to Join Google’s FLoC 
• DigiDay – “We Can’t un-FLoC Ourselves”: Googles Cookieless Ad Targeting Proposal under First from Ethics Researchers, Lawmakers for Discriminatory Potential 
• XDA Developers – It Seems Few Companies are On Board with Google’s FLoC 
• Google – Building a Privacy-First Future for Web Advertising 
• Think with Google – Five Pillars of a Holistic Marketing Measurement Plan 
• GitHub – Evaluation of Cohort Algorithms for the FLoC API 

1st Party Data

• Brain Labs Digital – Advertising on the Cookieless Web: Four Steps to Protect Your Data Now 
• AdWeek – First-Party Data is a Strategic Imperative in the Cookieless World 
• CampaignLive – Take Control of Your First-Party Data, or Quit Marketing 
• BCG – Responsible Data with First Party Data 
• Press Gazette – Interview: New York Times Explains the In-House Ad Tech is it Using to Prepare for the Death of Third-Party Cookies 

Contextual Targeting

• StackAdapt – Targeting Without Cookies: Time to Embrace Contextual Targeting 
• DigiDay – Why Advertisters are Embracing Context over User Data 

Unsure what to do next?

Our team of experts are on hand to help you adapt to the new privacy-first marketing landscape. See how we can help.

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