But there’s a paradox here: The brand consumers say they wouldn't trust with their personal information is, in fact, the same one to which they regularly hand over such data. And Facebook's usage and revenue figures don't appear to be hurting, despite its waning reputation as a brand.
That paradox might explain why marketers have been able to ignore, in the main, the crisis in trust.
But it’s a mistake to think—recent media headlines notwithstanding—that the trust crisis can be solved by any single player. This is an industrywide calamity that requires everyone in the marketing ecosystem to collaborate and be responsible for undertaking their unique, respective roles in resolving the problem.
Many have already taken action: Social media platforms are using technology and human labor to clean up their environments and better manage the partners with whom they share data; publishers are being more vigilant about eliminating and calling out fake news; government bodies are evaluating how to regulate the media and marketing industry, as exemplified by the EU's mandate for the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR); and pioneering technology companies are building blockchain platforms to make media buying more transparent and accountable. All of these are viable solutions, and many will eventually chip away at the problem, but marketers should take the opportunity now to control their own brand destinies.
Here are three simple steps—out of a handful I will be discussing at the May 16 conference—that brands should take now to stem the tide of eroding trust.
No. 1: Take a flight to safety. Brands should take a more active role in controlling the context in which their ads and branded content appear. The rise of programmatic advertising—now accounting for 83% of display ad spending, according to eMarketer—has ushered in a new era of audience-based targeting while vastly expanding the scale at which brands can connect with consumers. But this has come at a cost.
As eMarketer analyst Nicole Perrin said recently in her report on brand safety, "The rise of audience targeting has allowed brands to follow their customers wherever they go—but that has led those brands into some unsavory places."
Marketers can do many things to ensure their brands appear in safe places. They can take programmatic media buying in-house, and insist that their agency partners shift their programmatic spend toward premium publishing partners through programmatic direct buys (vs. real-time bidding [RTB]) and private exchanges (vs. open exchanges), as many are now doing. They can also whitelist brand-safe websites, and blacklist unsavory or unknown ones.
According to a recent Advertiser Perceptions survey, 56% of digital advertisers have taken deliberate steps to improve the brand safety of their media buys, including whitelisting of approved sites. And we have also noticed that more brands are taking their programmatic buying in-house—although the portion is likely still under a third.
While the above measures have all been talked about in the marketing community, there is evidence marketers are mostly paying lip service to them. Many surveys show that while a majority of brands believe brand safety is of paramount importance, few marketers actually move their dollars around to ensure their campaigns appear in safe contexts. The allure of cheap impressions, an automated buying process, and precision ad targeting at a mighty scale often end up trumping brand safety values. The flight to quality will not be cheap or easy, but in the long run it will serve brands well. Pick your publishing partners carefully.
No. 2: Focus more on first-party data, and less on third-party data. Marketers, especially those in the consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry, have relinquished much control over their relationships with consumers by relying on powerful platforms like Facebook and Google, which account for the lion’s share not only of digital ad revenues (57% in the US this year, per eMarketer), but also the data consumers share via their digital footprints.
Clearly, third-party data is addictive. But since providers of such data don’t have direct relationships with users, they make inferences to build their data sets, and those inferences can be wrong. According to a survey by Digiday, 80% of advertisers admit that third-party data is unreliable.
Ultimately, what brand marketers need to begin doing is building their own direct relationships with consumers, thereby collecting the data directly and bypassing the platforms and other middlemen.