Category results for "Perspectives"

Here are some of the best media stories our team has read so far this week:

NiemanLab | Inspired by The Daily, dozens of daily news podcasts are punching above their weight worldwide (7 min read)
The Hollywood Reporter | Streaming’s Data Compliance Headache: “Entertainment Companies Are Going to Be Targets” (5 min read)
60 Minutes | How does YouTube handle the site’s misinformation, conspiracy theories and hate? (14 minute view)
The New York Times | Who Will Tell the Truth About the Free Press? (5 min read)
Journalims.co.uk | ‘Audience canvas’: How to create an audience-first strategy (8 min read)
AdAge | Ad industry groups unite behind new privacy principles (4 min read)
The Drum | Top media trends that could shape the 2020s: Streaming wars, esports and smart speakers (6 min read)
Intelligencer | In the 2010s, BuzzFeed Made the World a Meme (34 min read)

Marketers: Here’s how we can ensure that consumers learn to love advertising again

December 3, 2019 Zoe Monborne, Product Communications Specialist – Outbrain

When it comes to digital consumption, I’m about as avid as it gets. While I use my Amazon firestick to find a new show, I simultaneously scroll through Instagram and shop on my laptop. I forego physical books so I can listen to podcasts while playing Candy Crush. I’m not “techy” in any form; I’m simply a product of our highly digital generation.

And, like everyone else, I’ve grown up with various forms of ads. TV, magazine, newspaper, billboards – you name it. However, today’s ad environment is with us even more pervasively. In our digital society, it’s harder to escape screens filled with ads and calls to buy now.

Don’t get me wrong, I recognize the role of advertising. As a marketer, I understand how ads benefit our ecosystem. I know why YouTube runs ads on video, Hulu has commercials, and CNN features personalized article recommendations.

However, I have realized that there’s something that marketers must do in order to restore the value of advertising. We need to change the consumer mindset around advertising. Of course, winning back consumer trust is no easy feat. To do so, we need to examine how the industry changed from enjoyable and glamorous to over-saturated and salacious. And we need to figure out where to go from here.

Advertising’s “Golden Age”

The Golden Age of Advertising (the 1960s to the late 1980s), was a time of big ideas and larger-than-life personalities. From Volkswagen’s “Think Small” and Apple’s “Think Different 1984” to Burger King’s “Have it Your Way,” and innumerable ads in between, the campaigns were engaging, witty, and captured consumer attention. With television making its ascent into every household, magazines catering to every interest, and newspapers as the primary source for getting the word out, advertising thrived. People actually looked forward to seeing pages filled with their glamorous idols touting the latest products and fashions.

So, what changed?

Calculating too much

In the Golden Age, ads thrived because they were vibrant, fun, and intriguing. They offered a creative and engaging experience that made consumers want to learn more and own the products. Today, advertising focuses heavily on data, personalization, and research. Frankly, though the goal is to appeal to consumers, digital advertising’s constant in-your-face tactics are off-putting.

The market is oversaturated, crowded, and cluttered with disjointed marketing messages. Too many times, a popup ad has interrupts and degrades the consumer experience, causing them to close the page altogether and never return. And beyond simply losing advertisings luster, we’ve lost the trust of consumers. They’ve been burned too many times by clickbait and fake news, not to mention unexpected and even unethical uses of their data, which has caused them to ignore or block ads altogether.

However, instead of acknowledging this discomfort, consumer avoidance makes the advertiser push harder to increase engagement. The disconnect is real. As a consumer, I am acutely aware of the ways that ads ruin my experience. And, as a marketer, I focus on ways to get ads in front of consumers. To help heal our unhealthy advertising relationship, I propose a different idea: creating ads that serve a purpose. Ads that help the consumer experience, not hurt it.

A new golden age

Purpose-driven and values-based marketing is a growing area in which brands are reconnecting with consumers on ideas that matter to them — culture, society, politics, etc. Nearly two-thirds (63%) of consumers prefer to purchase products and services from brands that stand for a purpose which reflects their own beliefs.

Nike’s famous “Dream Crazy” campaign, featuring Colin Kaepernick, struck a chord with consumers, both good and bad. But a year after the initial launch, Nike shares have surged 36% over the year, adding nearly $6 billion to the company’s market value. Marketers, the lesson learned here is that consumers don’t mind ads. But they want ads that mean something to them.

Advertising also thrived during its first golden age because of brand loyalty. You could show a consumer a logo — Nike’s Swoosh, McDonald’s Arch, Starbucks’ Siren — and they would instantly recognize the brand. To stay top-of-mind, brands made it a point to circulate their logos on newspapers, TVs, billboards, etc. But today, consumers are too desensitized to care. And data-driven efforts are not the brand-building campaigns of yesterday. Brand loyalty and successful marketing campaigns must be driven by value, so as not to turn off the customer or lose their attention.

A new Golden Age is right around the corner. We can win back consumer trust and show them the value of a smart ad campaign. This will happen as we evolve beyond disruptive nature of the digital ad industry and create well thought out content that focuses on a long-term brand story and excellent user experience.

Perspectives | Revenue

Fostering quality journalism through a brand safe open web

November 26, 2019 Eric Shih, Global SVP, Business Development—Teads

Almost half of comScore’s top 100 Web properties in terms of audience have some news component to their content offering. So, it is clear that news continues to represent a dominant share of online traffic. However, brand safety fiascos for advertisers on platforms such as YouTube and Facebook have swung the pendulum towards a conservative approach to advertising within news. The divisive political climate (and impending 2020 US elections) combined with increasing coverage of violent events, etc. further exacerbate potential risk for brands. It is now critical that publishers work with both advertisers and technology providers to balance their scale with a sound brand safety strategy to maintain and grow advertising monetization.

At Teads, we launched our global brand safety policy earlier this year to foster a sustainable advertising and media ecosystem. And we continue to advocate that publishers adopt constructive philosophies around brand safety. In addition to developing a brand safety policy, we have a few key best practices for every publisher to consider when developing a brand safety strategy.

Brand-safe best practices

1. Standardizing and enforcing brand safety processes

Although brand suitability will always be a subjective interpretation for individual brands based on their values and audiences, the industry first needs to define a lowest common denominator for universal brand safe content in order to develop scalable solutions. For example, most would agree that brands should not appear in or around content describing terrorist attacks or mass shooting events. News publishers have an opportunity to be proactive in defining relevancy standards and implementing a brand safety guarantee for their advertisers and audiences. Publishers can and should join initiatives that meet to evolve industry standards and best practices such as the Global Alliance for Responsible Media.

2. Technology and AI

There are tools available to publishers that allow them to more efficiently guarantee brand safe environments for their advertisers and even block risky content pre-bid. The key to success is seeking technological solutions that can optimally balance scale vs. quality. Keyword blacklists are currently the preferred (though blunt and rudimentary) instruments for many agencies and brands. Let’s call this “Brand Safety v 1.0.” Frankly, these tactics are a necessary evil for the application of brand safety in the absence of more efficient solutions. These days, publishers can also leverage technology tools to better target/anti-target contextual segments or leverage machine learning and natural language processing for their content filtering needs.

3. Educating the ecosystem

News publishers are already seeing advertisers shy away from news content in general and becoming the victims of blocklists applying to the entire news category. The problem with blacklisting hard news is that it eliminates a significant portion of online audience and scale for advertisers.

Publishers need to be proactive and implement solutions and processes to regain the trust of advertisers. It’s clearly more advantageous to block the minority of unsafe content vs. losing monetization on news traffic altogether, which is the current industry trend. We have to work together to advocate and educate brands and agencies that not only do ads perform better in news but also consumers trust premium news outlets (a positive halo that extends to ads on those properties).

If the industry does not coalesce around news publishers and continues to shift advertising budgets away from them, then we are ultimately on a path to defunding quality journalism and jeopardizing a free press. The result will be more disinformation, more advertising in the context of fake news and unsafe environments. It also reduces potentially massive quality audience reach for advertisers given the consumption of online news. That’s a scary proposition. Combining appropriate brand safety enforcement with premium editorial environments can not only effectively connect brands with relevant consumers, but also ensure that we support our democratic society at both a local and national level.

Perspectives

DCN’s must reads: week of November 21, 2019

November 21, 2019 Michelle Manafy, Editorial Director – DCN

Here are some of the best media stories our team has read so far this week:

Bloomberg Law | Facebook, Google Fund Nonprofits Shaping Federal Privacy Debate (11 min read)
News Media Alliance | Google News Shutdown in Spain Was Not as Bad as Google Would Have You Believe (4 min read)
The New York Times | Big Tech’s Toughest Opponent Says She’s Just Getting Started (6 min read)
The New Statesman | How the push notification came to rival the Six O’Clock News (5 min read)
CJR | The precarious state of local news giants (8 min read)
The New York Times | We’re Stuck With the Tech Giants. But They’re Stuck With Each Other. (17 min read)
The Guardian | The collapse of the information ecosystem poses profound risks for humanity (5 min read)
Ad Age | Technologist Stephen Wolfram puts a pin in social media information bubbles (5 min read)

Platforms, politics, people and sharks

November 20, 2019 Jason Kint, CEO – DCN

Last week at the 2019 World Media Congress in Las Vegas I had the privilege of being asked to address the weighty topic of “Platforms, Politics, and People.” At this moment in time, it presents a remarkable challenge to cover the confluence of these topics before a global audience.

I found myself trying illuminate a perilous intersection between the growing distrust of tech platforms (which continue to register record usage) and the growing divisiveness in politics. And, to make things even more challenging, my speaking slot was at 5 p.m. just before cocktails in Las Vegas, of all places.

And so, facing challenges both topical and logistical, I decided to do what had to be done: I cued up “Baby Shark.”

Jumping the shark

As much as this dreaded video is guaranteed to intractably embed itself in the mind of any hapless listener, it also represents the good of these topics. This song impossibly united all of Washington, regardless of politics, as the Nationals won their first ever World Series. It has racked up close to four billion views on Google’s YouTube making it one of the most watched videos of all time. If there is good in the world of platforms and politics, it’s represented in Baby Shark.

Yet, despite the tenaciously peppy and persistent beat of Baby Shark, my mind turned to the bigger, badder sort. After consulting DCN member National Geographic and the Merriam-Webster dictionary, I found the term I was looking for: feeding frenzy.

This wildly aggressive attack of prey by an animal or group of animals provides an accurate description of policy makers’ and the press’ relationship to tech companies right now. Their frenetic scrutiny of tech has been driven primarily by Facebook’s woes over the past 18 months. It took some time but there are already signs of Google’s blood in the water. The alpha predators are under attack.

Boiling the ocean

Tech platforms currently face two issues that are making big waves. The first is a slew of antitrust investigations, which are underway in the Germany, UK, Israel, Australia, and France. Oh, and also in the offices of nearly every one of the United States’ Attorneys General, not to mention by the Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission, and Congress. For perspective, recall the antitrust investigation of Microsoft two decades ago, which many argue provided the oxygen for Facebook and Google to launch. That investigation (which resulted on certain limitations being imposed on the company) involved a mere 20 states as compared with this bipartisan group of nearly 50.

On its own, an antitrust review might not cut too deeply. Significantly, however, this one takes place at the same time as new laws around privacy and data protection are being enacted globally. The business model of devouring personal data to micro-target advertising is at risk. It’s this intersection of data and competition policy which presents significant challenges to this mighty Duopoly.

Google and Facebook would prefer to keep antitrust scrutiny focused on the price of their products. That’s because most of their services are free to the end consumer. But price is not the only factor in an antitrust investigation. And, in an increasingly complex profit-driven data economy, new issues have arisen that raise the stakes. For one, there’s the obvious question of whether Facebook’s dominance allowed it to look the other way while users’ data was abused, and its post-IPO profits soared.

Shark tank

Significantly, today’s political concerns – and these investigations – are bipartisan. Republicans and Democrats alike are increasingly worried about data privacy and the ability for market entrants to innovate in a world where two companies dominate through data-based surveillance advertising. At the same time, everyone is getting more educated on the issues as we can see in the hearings. And we’re seeing an increasing flow of press coverage and research.

I find no better examples of these two developments – bipartisan concerns and savvy scrutiny – than in the actions of some of our youngest politicians:

The youngest member of the House is the media-friendly Democratic US Representative, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Ahead of Mark Zuckerberg testifying two weeks ago, she went to Twitter to learn more about the issues and asked the public for good lines of questioning. Her engaged constituents dutifully replied with more than 12,000 responses.

With this input, her questions of Zuckerberg captured significant attention and highlights spread through Twitter receiving millions of views. We witnessed a representative using Twitter to gather input to question one of the most powerful people in the world and then to move the discussion further along after the hearing. Simply put, she came of age with the Internet and social media and knows how to use it.

The youngest member of the Senate is Missouri’s Republican Senator, Josh Hawley. I played his grilling of a Google policy executive for attendees of the World Media Congress. The audience was clearly pleased to see a Google executive being expertly questioned about concerns ranging from antitrust to child safety and privacy.

Chumming the water

These matters continue to drive down consumer trust in Facebook and Google. Unfortunately, this is where we confront an uncomfortable dichotomy between the interests of advertisers and the public. To date, advertisers are still drunk on the precision targeting, efficiency, and scale that Facebook brings to the table.

As such, they’ve been willing to avert their attention from the growing body of research that shows that the perception of environment seeps into advertisements presented there. In the right context, that’s a good thing. In the wrong context, irreparable brand damage can occur.

Shark tale

The sailing is not smooth for publishers right now. While digital offers incredible opportunities for consumer engagement, audience interaction, and innovation, the market is reacting having been driven to the brink by the dominance of a few predatory players.

But it’s time to take the offensive and go on the hunt. There’s blood in the water and a frenzy of scrutiny buoyed along on a tide of changing consumer perspective. We need to focus on the opportunities emerging amidst this political and public scrutiny of the way in which information is being distributed and data is being collected and deployed.

DCN member research shows considerable growth in non-advertising revenues driven primarily by subscriptions and direct-consumer revenues. DCN’s public research, further confirmed by recent News Media Alliance research, also shows that most digital subscribers are happy with the value they’re receiving and at the same time are not concerned about how much they’re spending in any given month. These are two very good things: Consumers are happy with the value and not closely tracking what they’re spending. I smell opportunity in the water. The launch of Disney+ last week for $6.99 per month saw more than 10 million customers sign on in the first 24 hours. That’s a clear testament to this dynamic.

Open water

With all of this in mind, there are four things I encourage everyone to focus on as we continue to build safe and sustainable businesses. First, know that trust is the currency our industry must capitalize on. Publishers can take their uniquely trust-based consumer relationships and brand safe environments to the bank. Second, premium publisher brands add considerable value to any platform. This is evident in the $100 million Facebook spent to entice publishers to participate into its latest foray into news. Third, media’s revenue mix is changing. Publishers are doubling down on consumer revenues and it’s paying off. And fourth, direct relationships win, and data is very much a part of this equation.

Above all, publishers need to maintain their trust-based relationships with consumers. They must protect their data and ensure that under emerging privacy laws, Facebook and Google don’t find ways to circumvent these protections and continue to vacuum up consumer data outside of their expectations. We must continue to illuminate these behaviors when we see them, and to build the next wave of digital innovation as the tide turns against the Duopoly.

Perspectives

DCN’s must reads: week of November 14, 2019

November 14, 2019 Michelle Manafy, Editorial Director – DCN

Here are some of the best media stories our team has read so far this week:

The Wall Street Journal | The Great Streaming Battle Is Here. No One Is Safe. (15 min read)
Recode | 10 lessons for Disney, Apple, and all the new streaming companies trying to take down Netflix (7 min read)
The New York Times | Powerful Coalition Pushes Back on Anti-Tech Fervor (7 min read)
The Wall Street Journal | How Google Edged Out Rivals and Built the World’s Dominant Ad Machine: A Visual Guide (10 min read)
The Financial Times | How top health websites are sharing sensitive data with advertisers (11 min read)
The Correspondent | The new dot com bubble is here: it’s called online advertising (24 min read)
Digiday | Publishers try new tacks to drum up interest in their ad platforms (5 min read)

Perspectives

Let’s celebrate the decline of the third-party cookie

November 13, 2019 Kristy Schafer, VP Americas – Permutive

The “death” of the third-party cookie is a popular narrative shaping the advertising industry today. But while the usual story is one of doom and gloom for publishers the reality is altogether more positive. This is a headline we should celebrate.

Consider this: For more than a decade, third-party providers have aggregated publisher data, packaged it and sold it to advertisers. This revenue should – and will – be reclaimed by publishers in the months to come.

Today, third-party cookies are at the heart of the digital advertising economy, which is built on data. Programmatic has enabled advertising to be transacted based on rich granular user data and is now used to fuel 85% of all digital advertising.

The promise for advertisers is that they can hyper-target their perfect audience. It’s little wonder the third-party data market is now worth $19bn in the US alone.

A privacy-first world

However, it’s an unsustainable model, and one that is already breaking. Browsers and regulators are enforcing privacy restrictions that will change the very foundations of the internet. Tomorrow’s web is moving to a privacy-first model, where third-party cookies are no longer available for advertising. There are also legal implications for businesses that do not comply with consumer data rights.

Take both Firefox and Safari, which this year has made significant changes to their browsers including the routine blocking of third-party cookies. To media buyers, these users are invisible. They cannot be served targeted advertising. With the two browsers controlling up to 40% of overall traffic to publisher sites, it’s easy to see why the doomsday headlines are coming in thick and fast.

Yet there is another way. One in which publishers which change their business models can survive and even thrive in a world without third-party cookies.

Be prepared

Currently, publishers are in two camps. They’re either ignoring the coming cookie-apocalypse, hoping that industry ID solutions will be their salvation – or they’re being proactive, rebuilding their businesses around first-party data instead. Let’s take a look at what it takes to be proactive.

Instead of putting their destiny in yet another external company’s hands, every publisher should see this new world as an opportunity, in which they are the primary, and indeed only, online advertising data supplier. Let’s call it the data 2.0 opportunity.

Unlike third parties, publishers have the technical and legal right to process user data. That’s because they have a direct relationship with consumers. This opens the door to a huge $19bn opportunity for publishers, in the US alone. As third-party data disappears, advertisers will look to publishers to access targeted audiences. Below is some advice for publishers to succeed and take advantage.

Own your own data

The relationship that a publisher has with its audience via subscriptions and behavioral data is becoming much more valuable. But publishers must shift their mindset and stop needlessly giving away their data. They must protect their advertising revenue by building a first-party data strategy to reduce their reliance on third-party cookies.

Understand your users

Third-parties have spent over ten years building and telling audience “stories”. Want to find a sports enthusiast? They could once build you an entire back story about these users, and allow you to target them all over the web. Not anymore, thanks to Safari and Firefox. By using third-party data today, advertisers have no differentiation between a CNN.com, and a NYTimes.com sports enthusiastic and have significant challenges with scale. Luckily, publishers are in a great position to start building their own audience “stories” with rich first party data, not relying on third-party data to do this work for them.

The best place for an advertiser to find and understand a sports enthusiast is directly from a relevant publisher.

Educate your sales teams

Adapting to a first-party data strategy requires expertise in an area that some publishers may be neglecting. It requires marketing their strengths and repositioning their offering to media buyers. They will need new skills that mirror what adtech companies have been doing so well over the last ten years. If you prepare your sales force to sell with accurate first-party data, you will eliminate any gaps between audience creation and how this data is sold in the market.

Privacy-first = on-device

Chrome, Apple, Brave, and many other tech companies have recently discussed moving data-processing to the device, using ‘edge computing’. They suggest that in order to better protect user privacy, the amount of data leaving a device should be limited. As soon as any user data leaves the device (and is sent to the cloud), a user’s privacy is at risk of breach by a third-party.

It is critical to keep data on-device in the data 2.0 world because your method of processing data is scrutinized.

First-party audiences

There has been a lot of press recently about the rise of context. Instead of relying on profiling individual users, Advertisers are increasingly looking to leverage the context around what a user is reading and their behavior on-site as a replacement of third-party data.

As third-party cookies decline publishers hold the richest data sets on the web. We support initiatives like IAB Data Labels which begins to explore a common taxonomy around audiences, and not cookies. An advertiser can find their audience in a unified way.

There is a better way

A recent study showed that publishers stand to lose around 52% of their revenue if Chrome also restricts third-party cookies. This should be a wake-up call to publishers to act now.

The proposed solution is not theoretical. This year we have seen publishers monetize their Safari traffic that lacks third-party cookies. Publisher Immediate Media has seen a 135% increase in revenue year-on-year, Stylist has doubled its advertising yield and Entrepreneur has recorded a 7.6x increase in targetable inventory which resulted in a dramatic boost in their revenue.

Each is in control of their own destiny, unlocking audiences through their first-party data and monetizing it effectively – even when third-party cookies are unavailable. They are ready for the demise of the cookie. Are you?

About the author

Kristy Schafer works with publishers and top talent to grow US revenues for the industry’s only publisher-focused DMP. With deep expertise in advertising, data and analytics, Schafer spends the majority of her time understanding how changes in ad-tech, browser updates, and privacy impact publishers. She is helping to lead an evolution in the ad industry.

Perspectives

DCN’s must reads: week of November 7, 2019

November 7, 2019 Michelle Manafy, Editorial Director – DCN

Here are some of the best media stories our team has read so far this week:

The New York Times | The Great Streaming Space-Time Warp Is Coming (6 min read)
The Hollywood Reporter | 90 Million or Bust? Streaming TV’s Great Subscriber Race Begins (5 min read)
MediaPost | Proposed Law Requires Platforms To Allow Opt-Outs From Personalized Content (2 min read)
The Washington Post | Inside TikTok: A culture clash where U.S. views about censorship often were overridden by the Chinese bosses (13 min read)
Financial Times | Journalism officially goes non-profit (5 min read)
Hot Pod | Festivus, for the Rest of Us (17 min read)
The New York Times | The Government Protects Our Food and Cars. Why Not Our Data? (10 min read)
Buzzfeed | These Hugely Popular Local News Sites In The US And Canada Are Fake (8 min read)
Nieman Lab | Watch your language: “Data voids” on the web have opened a door to manipulators and other disinformation pushers (11 min read)

Innovation | Perspectives

Why winning means the race is never done

November 1, 2019 David DeWolf, Founder and CEO – 3Pillar Global

Remember the success of the Gameboy? It’s been 30 years since the first version came out in 1989, and Nintendo waited five years before releasing the next iteration of the product, The Super Game Boy, in 1994. This is a far cry from the pace of output of today’s Fortnite, which creates new missions on a weekly basis. Earlier this month, the release of its latest season was followed in real time around the world.

It’s the new speed of change. Facebook went from a Harvard-only site founded in Mark Zuckerberg’s dorm room to a million-member social network available on mobile phones within two years. The first Uber ride was given in San Francisco in 2010; by 2011, the company had launched its international presence in Paris. Instagram grew so quickly that it was bought by Facebook within two years of its release.

The pace of innovation has exploded over the past few years and shows no signs of slowing down. And this is not just change for change’s sake. This acceleration is a response to customer, market, and technology changes, and it’s an exciting time for both consumers and product developers.

Keeping up with customers

However, it also means that companies can no longer take half a decade to develop their next product. In a world of such rapid-fire change, customers have come to expect products that evolve and change along with them. This means that companies that want to stay ahead of the market not only have to move fast, but they also have to realize that the race is never over. For companies to stay relevant to their customers, they have to excel at, and embrace, rapid fire change.

Amazon is the classic example of this. Over the course of 25 years, Jeff Bezos’s trillion-dollar company evolved from being a bookstore for Seattle residents housed in a garage to our go-to online retailer and the producer of some of our most popular entertainment content. Bezos’s success lies in a certain kind of humility. He has a constant willingness to tweak his business model. He has not allowed any one path, design, product or program to be sacred. Instead, he listens to his customers and excels at creating the changes they crave, which in turn creates better business outcomes for Amazon.

Gaming the system

Back to Fortnite. Part of the reason players find Fortnite so addictive is because it renews itself a few times a year. Each new update is called a “season” and introduces a new map and new items for players to use. We couldn’t have imagined these game-changing forms of advertising a few years ago. And they only exist because the developers behind Fortnite are constantly looking for new ways to enhance the user experience. They find ways to push the boundaries of what players expect and redefine what “gaming” means.

Other tech innovators have embraced similar tactics. Netflix and Spotify, for instance, not only keep users hooked by updating their content libraries regularly, but also by generating their own content, like original shows and playlists. Delivery apps like Grubhub and Postmates keep their eye out for new restaurants to ensure that customers have access to the food they want when they want it. Apple’s ongoing revisions ensure that we buy a new iPhone every few years to keep up. Harris Teeter allows customers to shop for groceries, place catering orders and reorder prescriptions on their mobile app.

Change your mindset

So what does this mean for your company? It means you have to adopt The Product Mindset, with change becoming an integral part of the way your company operates. The most successful companies don’t fund research and development on a case-by-case basis. They incorporate it into their annual and monthly budgets, the same way they budget for sales or HR. That way, when a competitor releases a new model, or when research reveals unexpected consumer needs, a company is ready to respond. Its teams don’t need to wait for endless approvals or push forward on obsolete or ineffective initiatives.

At first, this might sound overwhelming, even exhausting. We’re wired to appreciate certainty and clarity. If the product is never done, instability and change become the new normal. But with that instability and change comes opportunity – the opportunity to deliver on consumer desires more rapidly and effectively than ever before. And the good news is that any company, no matter its size or industry, can embrace this approach. All it takes is the humility to accept that there’s always room for improvement and the courage to chase that improvement, wherever it might lead.

About the author

David DeWolf is founder and CEO of 3Pillar Global and the author of the new book The Product Mindset: Succeed in the Digital Economy by Changing the Way Your Organization Thinks.

TikTok: How China concerns highlight the lack of US leadership on data

October 31, 2019 Chris Pedigo, SVP Government Affairs – DCN

Last week, US Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) sent a letter to the Director of National Intelligence to request an assessment of the national security risks posed by TikTok. As you may know, TikTok is owned by ByteDance, which is based in Beijing. With TikTok’s popularity surging worldwide, the Senators expressed concerns about the Chinese Communist government’s ability to access consumer data collected by TikTok, censor speech, or even influence elections.

Of course, these concerns are not new. In the past, other policymakers have expressed similar concerns about the Chinese government when there is news about a US company operating in the Chinese market. Recently, Apple and Google among others were criticized for removing apps from their app stores that the Chinese government did not like.

A unified front

Chinese censorship has long been an issue that runs contrary to American beliefs and policy. Across the board, American policymakers agree that free speech is an important principle that should be protected. And this political consensus informs our stance with regard to China. There are questions about the best way to strategically engage with China, but there is no question that America supports the right of people to protest and speak freely.

The Chinese government has also been heavy handed with its use of data for surveillance as well as to monitor public (and private) sentiment. Though it has GDPR-like data regulation, what companies can do and what the government can do under Chinese law are quite different. This becomes a more complicated issue for the U.S. as we lack a federal standard or consensus for what constitutes ethical use or reasonable protection of consumer data by corporate entities or the government.

In 2018, Europe began to enforce the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which provides a framework for the proper collection and use of consumer data. And, in the last year, a handful of states (California most prominently) have adopted consumer privacy laws. For years, individual states have maintained separate and different data security and breach notification requirements. However, federal policymakers remain divided over a national standard for how consumer data should be protected, collected and used. This lack of consensus hinders America’s ability to lead the global conversation about data. And it certainly prevents our ability to take a unified stance on China’s data policies.

Competitive behavior

This year, we have seen multiple investigations opened into the anticompetitive behavior of Google and Facebook. Some have argued against breaking up Facebook and Google because these two companies need to be big enough to compete with China. For me, that argument runs counter to the core American values of democracy and capitalism. Ignore for the moment that monopolies (or duopolies in this case) tend to grow stagnant and stifle innovation. Our answer to China shouldn’t be “let’s be more like China!” Rather, we should be focused on enabling a fair marketplace where small and large businesses can compete, where consumers are protected and empowered, and where ideas and speech are protected.

DCN has long supported the passage of a federal standard for data security and breach notifications and a comprehensive consumer privacy law. Having a single national standard for the protection and use of consumer data would benefit consumers, who currently have no or different laws that apply. It would also benefit businesses, which would prefer to avoid having to comply with multiple and sometimes conflicting state laws.

Now, we have one more reason to unify our policy. A national standard on data security and use would get the US off the sidelines and enable American policymakers to lead the global conversation about data.