Players in the advertising industry are figuring out ways to deal with significant change if the government decides to implement recommendations from the Privacy Act Review.
The federal government appears ready to give a measure of control to individuals on how their personal information is used in direct marketing and advertising.
Among the review's recommendations, the government has agreed in-principle that individuals should have a right to opt-out of their personal information being used or disclosed for direct marketing purposes, subject to refining the definition of direct marketing.
Trent Lloyd, head of APAC at Eyeota, a Dun & Bradstreet company and a global provider of audience data for the marketing and advertising industries, said some around the industry may take some time to adjust.
“Not all demand side platforms are created equal just like not all data partners are created equal and some seem to be more front-footed in terms of preparing for this change,” he said.
“The whole industry is still massively skewed towards cookies and until there's confidence that there's not going to be even a two or three month significant blip, that's really the thing holding it back the most from happening sooner.”
Lloyd said that having operated as a global business, dealing with privacy regulations isn’t a new requirement for Eyeota.
“We spent two years preparing for the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) regulation in the EEA and it definitely had an impact on our business, but we made a strategic decision to accept that we were going to see an impact to the volumes of the data we had in the UK and Europe,” Lloyd told AdNews.
“It was a case of ‘less is more’ and by the time the GDPR was in effect, we were one of the few providers left standing in market with a privacy compliant set of audience data."
“The audience data we offer in Europe is compliant with GDPR and, more importantly, deliver results for advertisers. For example, a luxury auto brand in the UK used privacy compliant Eyeota audience data for targeting high-net worth audiences on Facebook and saw an 81% lift in ad recall and impact for their advertising campaign."
Peter Leonard, the chair of the Australian Data and Insights Association’s Privacy Compliance Committee, told AdNews that in May that if all of the current proposals were enacted, it would be “directly comparable in terms of the level of requirements that organisations have to meet with the major regimes overseas”.
Lloyd said that with the conversation in Australia around privacy ramping up – whether by advertisers, agencies, regulators or providers of audience solutions like Eyeota - he similarly expects that Australia will end up with a set of regulations that are “every bit as rigorous” as the likes of GDPR or the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) regulation out of the US.
“Our view is we're preparing and expect a tough privacy environment we're not daunted as we're already used to operating in those environments,” he said.
Katie Grannell (pictured right), Eyeota’s VP of global marketing, agreed that privacy and cookies will be the big story for the market, saying that how that’s going to play out for advertisers is more testing around alternatives of IDs.
“What we find is there’s a misconception in market that the end of third party cookies means the end of third party data,” she told AdNews
“I think there's going to be a lot more questions from an advertiser level on what's the source of this data.
“That’s what we're hearing from our clients - what's the difference between deterministic versus probabilistic? What's the source of our data? What’s the methodologies? Advertisers are searching for a new level of transparency around audience data and as an industry we must be prepared to answer those questions."
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