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Tags containing: "GDPR"

Innovation | Perspectives

Trendspotting in 2018: Keep an eye on Health Tech

As we head into 2018, there are very few things as certain as the growing relevance and impact of the healthcare sector and health technology. As I look to the year ahead, here are my top 5 health tech predictions:

1. Native advertising will be the drug of choice for pharma marketers

Pharma marketers have a dual challenge of raising awareness about both medical conditions and the products that treat them. Native advertising and content marketing address both objectives by allowing marketers to capture mindshare in highly relevant environments while satisfying brand safety and regulatory requirements. Pharma marketers will recognize this value and shift significant budgets from TV and print to this digital line item.

2. Radical health personalization 

The combination of data from wearables and apps, along with known digital behaviors can create a very powerful recipe for personalized healthcare. From smart devices that communicate with each other to relevant sequential advertising, messaging to consumers will take on a far more individualized approach. Your smart coffee maker might remind you to take your cholesterol medication in the morning, and you will receive ads across multiple devices throughout the day reminding you to refill your allergy prescription, prompting an alert on your phone to go off when you are within one mile of the pharmacy while you are on your way home from work.

3. GDPR will drive development of transformative targeting capabilities

GPDR impacts the way data can be used to target consumers.  These new guidelines place even more stringent regulations around health data, genetic data, and biometric data. Strategic alliances among publishers, data providers and advertisers will form to create new ways to find these audiences in this new world order.

4. Wearable data will be in the hands of the few

Fitness trackers, life-logging platforms and the proliferation of healthcare apps provide an abundance of data, such as steps, heart rate, and sleep patterns, which can be combined with other known information to create highly personalized messaging.  As the wearable industry matures, there will be major consolidation. Apple, Google and Samsung will be the last men standing and will control all of this valuable first party data.  It will be a three horse race to see who can best leverage these insights.

5. AI and ML will save lives in 2018

AI and ML will revolutionize clinical trial recruitment by finding patients based on a variety of factors including symptoms and co-morbidities, and matching up individual online behaviors with relevant messaging to create a highly targeted, message-specific campaign of one.

Wishing you all a happy — and healthy — 2018!

Sloan Gaon is the CEO of PulsePoint, leading the company’s vision and mission to deliver integrated, value-based digital marketing solutions for advertisers and publishers. A renowned industry veteran, Mr. Gaon has executive management expertise in global digital marketing, content and e-commerce.

 

Advertising | Innovation

Personalization without people: What happens when no one can track consumers?

The alignment of new laws, reader advocacy, and technology has opened up a challenge to user tracking tools. While some express concern that an end to unbridled tracking will hinder the digital ecosystem, this is an enormous opportunity for publishers to take the lead in building the next generation of personalization technology. However, this evolution in personalization will need to be built on a foundation of editorial metadata, which will drive everything from video playlists to targeted advertising.

A new door opens

A new type of personalization that eschews user-based targeting is coming. In part this will be driven by the fact that many analytics, ad tech, and personalization-tech companies will be deeply affected by the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). An AdAge headline once proclaimed that the GDPR will “rip global digital ecosystem apart.” While that may be a bit alarmist, the GDPR will force companies operating within the EU, and the third party tools they use, to adhere to a strict opt-in for all tracking. It will also levy severe penalties on those companies within EU jurisdiction that fail to do so.

The omnipresent motivation behind the law, though, has failed to prompt the development of similar legislation in the U.S. Despite results and sentiment that suggest otherwise, targeting remains central to many marketing strategies. Brands have found user targeting programmatic campaigns less effective than they expected. Consumer groups have formed in protest of the functionality of user tracking in action (such as ads appearing with no regards to the content they appear on). Individuals on social networks find retargeting approaching some sort of uncanny valley — a point at which its very accuracy is becoming deeply discomforting. And we’re even seeing the start of a conversation around user targeting happening in Congress.

A victory for publishers

Publishers have a mission to treat their readers and viewers ethically. The good news is that smart publishers can (and do) run user-targeting related tools on that basis. The personalization of ads and news has become a significant trend, one that many are still chasing. However, the fundamental underlying technology is challenged by the GDPR. Even if publishers never conduct any business outside of the U.S., the vendors who power personalization tools do. We operate on literal reams of data but must face a future where comparatively little is available.

These oncoming shifts in the marketplace shouldn’t frighten publishers. They are likely to hurt the thousands of middleware third-party ad tech companies that have failed to deliver on user targeting for years now while skimming profits. A push to decrease both publisher and advertiser reliance on user targeting is an opportunity.

Metadata to the rescue

Publishers need to take a look at the new generation of tools that can provide the data needed for personalization on-page without ever tracking a user. Metadata standards are improving and adding detail. Our current tools consider article relationships mostly in keywords and categories but new ways of telling the story about a story could bring about a revolution in personalization.

Almost by accident, social media has pushed thousands of sites to adopt Open Graph, an RDF-based standard built to provide detailed site data. Search engines have long supported and rewarded structured data like hCard. Improvement in the Schema.org project, along with increased support of JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data (JSON-LD) by a variety of platforms, has made it an increasingly promising standard. Unfortunately, The Schema Project, which is complex and lacking good documentation and in-action examples, has been challenging to adopt. Publishers have also lacked a clear reward for use. However, that is changing with the announcement of support by Google for the use of structured data for fact checking.

Regardless of how successful the fact checking markup project becomes, it demonstrates that page-to-page relational metadata is joining other complex metadata systems as part of the future of publishing. With privacy concerns on the rise, it behooves publishers to start considering these systems as part of the future of personalization.

A structured future

Beyond keywords and tags, there is an embarrassment of new options for metadata that can create a unique experience on each webpage more tailored to the moment the reader encounters an article than following them with cookies ever was. While a reader might have been shopping for shoes yesterday, what they read today may put them in a very different mindset. And the reader of today is a more useful target for personalization than the reader of yesterday.

What can we build on using enhanced metadata? Geographic coordinates could drive a set of recommendations even more relevant than attempting to geotarget the user. Article authorship has worked well for media companies where the byline promises a particular voice. We can build playlist systems that find their next videos through more than title keywords, looking at producer credits, length and related affiliate offers. Types of content or referenced urls in the body of an article can allow personalization tools to recommend other articles that share a particular format, or ads that sell the referenced type.

Planning beyond keywords

Taking advantage of these opportunities will require different ways of thinking about what everyone creates and how it breaks down. It won’t just be up to an SEO expert to drop tags on a page. News organizations will find that optimizing for search, social, or ads will require taking advantage of all the opportunities that complex metadata provides and operating within a larger plan for how metadata should be handled. The editorial and business sides will need to work together to consider the whole of outlets’ output, prioritizing approaches, and building out tools that automate and suggest metadata structures.

Owners of this process will need to consider personalization on a variety of factors that describe form, format, key ideas and digital objects. They’ll have to build out a framework on how articles connect to each other that will describe small universes of content. A site that takes full advantage of metadata structures can promise a richer experience for readers, viewers and listeners than any provided through cookie-based tracking, an experience based on in-the-moment intent.

Our current generation of overly-targeted ads and recommendations don’t just fail to perform, they’re creepy and overpriced. Our audiences deserve more and our ethics require that we provide it. We have the technology and industry pressure to deploy successful alternatives. Understanding, expanding and adapting the use of detailed metadata across the web will build better media companies and a better open and well-connected internet.

Aram Zucker-Scharff is the Director for Ad Engineering in The Washington Post’s Research, Experimentation and Development group. He is also the lead developer for the open-source tool PressForward and a consultant on content strategy and newsroom workflows. He was one of Folio Magazine’s 15 under 30 in the magazine media industry. He previously worked as Salon.com’s full stack developer. His work has been covered multiple times in journalism.co.uk and he has appeared in The Atlantic, Digiday, Poynter, and Columbia Journalism Review. He has also worked as a journalist, a community manager and a journalism educator.

Perspectives | Policy

Why the GDPR will force you to understand your customers’ needs

When I was 14, I walked door to door selling subscriptions for the local newspaper. It paid a lot better than ditch digger (which I also tried), but it also required thick skin. I quickly learned that I needed a good elevator pitch that captured the essence and value of what I was selling and that helped me make a connection with the person on the other side of the door-frame. If I could do all of that in 10 seconds, then the conversation almost always went well. Sometimes it led to a sale, sometimes it led to “come back later,” and sometimes it just led to a pleasant conversation. All of those outcomes were infinitely better than getting a door slammed in my face. I imagine it was also a much better experience for the prospective subscriber who had just been interrupted by some 14-year-old kid ringing their door bell.

One key to improving my elevator pitch was having a thorough understanding of the product. In this case, the local newspaper. Then I needed to master the value proposition, which meant tuning into the customers’ needs. The key value for most subscribers was the connection to their local community. This was the 1980s, so the paper was the primary way to keep abreast of local politics, sports, events, weather, and to read the classifieds. It was impossible to communicate the value proposition to a prospective subscriber without understanding how a subscription would be helpful to them.

Now, we get all this local information in a very different way. But, what’s now often missing in today’s digital ecosystem is the basic communication with consumers. Some companies do it well – see Apple’s just-in-time notices that allow apps and websites to ask consumers for permission to collect and use sensitive data like location and contacts. However, entire categories of companies aren’t communicating with consumers AT ALL. Just look at the thousands of ad tech companies that track unwitting consumers across the web.

Maybe there’s value to data collection in these contexts. But companies that don’t have a solid value proposition on the added value that they can effectively communicate to consumers better be ready for the door to slam.

The coming enforcement of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the likely passage of ePrivacy Regulation in Europe will force companies to better explain what they are offering to consumers. In short, they’ll have to develop an elevator pitch.

For years, industry trade groups have heralded the consumer benefits of big data. But these benefits are often articulated in long-winded, research white papers designed to justify unbridled data collection to regulators. The fact is that, like their predecessor, direct mail, these “highly targeted ads” are more often viewed as creepy than carefully customized. Certainly, customers sometimes appreciate experiences tailored to their past behavior and preferences. However, giving them control over what data is collected and telling them why does not negate that possibility. Effectively communicating the “why” is the essence of the elevator pitch after all.

Starting in the spring of 2018, ubiquitous, non-transparent data collection is not going to fly in Europe. And in a global economy, that means marketers and advertisers everywhere need to pay attention. Companies will have to figure out concise and compelling ways to explain their value proposition to consumers in order to get their consent.

As a young newspaper salesman, I had to knock on the door and—if a customer was willing to open it—I had a brief opportunity to demonstrate the value the local newspaper could deliver. Otherwise, that door would close and I might not get another chance.

Based on my experience, the companies that understand why consumers value their product will be the ones that emerge victorious in this new landscape. Along the way, the whole digital experience might be improved for everyone. And the result will certainly be better than a potential customer opting to download an ad blocker instead.

Perspectives

How the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation drives data quality

The regulatory burdens of Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) have the advertising industry in a flurry. The industry press is rife with doomsday scenarios predicting the end of online advertising.

Is the regulation complex and in some instances, onerous? Yes.

Does it signal the end of online advertising? No.

GDPR does, however, force companies to examine the costs of collecting and using online behavioral data. Because GDPR increases the compliance costs associated with the collection of data, it becomes necessary to examine whether the collected data is worth the added compliance expense. Why absorb compliance costs for data that may or may not be valuable to clients and partners? While the industry has been talking about a “flight to quality” for years, GDPR has cemented Lotame’s commitment to data quality initiatives.

The Personal Approach

“Personal data” under the GDPR is broadly defined to include personally identifiable data points like name and email address, as well as less precise data points like cookies, device IDs, and IP address. The rationale is that modern technology allows marketers to identify individuals with one or more data points, even if those data points do not refer to each individual by name.

The problem with this broad definition of “personal information” is that GDPR treats anonymous data and personally identifiable information as similarly situated. A company that collects and uses cookie data has nearly the same compliance obligations as a bank that collects and stores highly sensitive financial data. The bank, and the consumers it serves, are all well aware of the risks inherent to the storage and processing of financial data. A breach has significant consequences for both the bank and the consumer. For this reason, the bank is able to pass some portion of its high compliance costs along to the consumer in the form of fees. These fees help to make banking one of the world’s most enduring, and lucrative, industries.

How the Cookie Crumbles

The potential loss or unauthorized disclosure of cookie data did not, until relatively recently, raise the ire of consumers or regulators. But now, with GDPR, cookie data is placed in the same category as financial data – meaning that a company like Lotame has the same compliance obligations with respect to its cookie data as does a bank that transacts in highly sensitive financial data. While regulators may view cookie data as having equal footing with consumer names and addresses, marketers do not, and they have not been willing to pay premium dollars for data that is viewed as less precise than personally identifiable information.

On the one hand, GDPR validates what Lotame has known and proselytized for years – that data is tremendously valuable – even when that data is not tied to personal information like name, email address, street address, or telephone number. On the other hand, GDPR makes it costly to collect, store and push large volumes of cookie and device data. There is substantial risk that compliance costs, relative to the earning potential of this data, are being driven too high. In order to drive revenue in the face of mounting regulatory burdens, Lotame and other players in online advertising must focus on quality.

Quality Over Quantity

Over the past year, we have invested heavily in technology and partnerships that emphasize quality over scale. Earlier this year, for example, we announced a partnership with Are You a Human, to provide advertisers and their agencies the ability to quickly and easily identify non-human traffic and create new bot-free audiences for ad targeting, analysis, content personalization, and more. This allows our clients to remove all profiles identified as bots, to reduce wasted ad spend, decrease bot traffic, and increase conversions. For Lotame, it also ensures that we are not absorbing compliance costs for data that offers minimal value to our clients and partners.

GDPR is a game changer for the online advertising industry, but it is not the death knell that many fear. With its emphasis on consumer transparency and consent, Lotame expects GDPR to produce higher quality data assets from more engaged consumers. We have embraced the regulations as an opportunity to review our business practices with fresh eyes and have encouraged our clients and partners to share in this approach.

Tiffany Morris is General Counsel & Vice President of Global Privacy at Lotame, overseeing all aspects of the company’s global legal strategy and operations. She brings more than 10 years of legal and business experience in the advertising, sports, and entertainment industries. Prior to joining Lotame, Tiffany held legal and business development roles at Vox Media, Inc., during a period of significant growth and acquisition activity. She previously served as Legal Counsel for The Kraft Group, where she handled a full range of legal matters for a private portfolio of companies, including the New England Patriots, Gillette Stadium, and Patriot Place. Tiffany started her career with the consulting firm McKinsey & Company. Tiffany has a BA from Wellesley College and a JD from Boston College Law School.

Perspectives

What the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation means for website compliance

Today’s websites and apps are powered by sophisticated technology. After all, to meet consumer expectations—for search, content consumption, social networking, shopping, travel booking, news, banking, gaming, and so much more—websites (from ecommerce and entertainment to corporate) must incorporate robust solutions on the backend.

The workings of these sorts of solutions aren’t news to Revenue and Ad Operations professionals. But for everyone else: They are where security problems start.

Think about it. Companies generally outsource 80% of a typical website’s functionality to vendors providing specialized services like data management platforms, image or video hosting, marketing analytics, content delivery, customer identification, payment processing, and more. This third-party code operates outside the purview of your IT and security infrastructure, which means that you control less than 25% of the code executing on your website.

As the website operator, you have no insight into when this code is compromised to act as a conduit for malware propagation and unauthorized audience data collection. Considering the current regulatory environment around data compliance, the above statistics should make you nervous.

The Cookie Crumbles

To put it bluntly: You can’t control what you don’t see. Your digital properties have more third-party code than you realize. And this code is compromised more often than you think.

As the digital risk management provider for many of the world’s largest digital properties, The Media Trust scans websites for security and policy violations and actively manages more than 600 incidents at any one time. We’ve found that some of the simplest websites average 10 third-party vendors. But most have dozens. These vendors continuously change and so do their actions.

The Media Trust team often detects unauthorized or persistent cookies with a lifespan of 30 years or more. One brand-name ecommerce website recently dropped a 7,000+ year cookie. This raises a huge issue with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which goes into effect in May 2018. GDPR is the first EU-wide regulation addressing personal data protection rights of residents. In essence, GDPR harmonizes and strengthens the individual national laws to give consumers enhanced rights over the information that is collected, used, and stored about them. It also codifies a penalty structure for violations (up to 4% of annual revenue/turnover). As a result, companies will need to dramatically change their approach to managing consumer data including online behavior.

Compliance to GDPR requires detailed, real-time, knowledge of executing digital partners and their activity. This includes the type of data collected and how long the partner remains on the user’s device, i.e., browser, phone, tablet, etc.

If you are wondering how GDPR affects media publishers and their ad tech partners, then you’ve got a lot of catching up to do. GDPR supports the data protection rights of every EU residents. Therefore, every business with EU interests—in the form of customers, legal entities, business infrastructure, etc.—needs to comply. And the global nature of the internet means any business with EU website traffic or app users need to comply as well.

Evaluate—and Modify—Operations

Clearly, to reduce exposure to GDPR violations enterprises should make some changes to digital operations. At a minimum, execute the following for all your digital properties—websites (desktop & mobile) and mobile apps:

  1. Communicate your privacy policy
  • Write a clear privacy policy explaining use of third-party code and data collection activity.
  • Post policy banner on homepage.
  • Deliver internal training.
  1. Provide easy-to-use opt in/ opt out mechanism
  • Explain the need for tracking and how cookies drive digital operations.
  • Share links to individual privacy policies of all in-scope vendors on your site.
  • Allow individuals to explicitly agree and/or refuse tracking.
  1. Understand how website/ app-generated data is acquired, used & stored
  • Identify data: Registration, Cookies, IP address, and device ID.
  • Assess the legal basis to collect data and determine if consent is necessary, e.g., Personally Identifiable Information (PII) vs. transaction functionality, etc.
  • Evaluate the need for a specific policy regarding data of minor activity (16 years old in GDPR; under 13 years old in U.K. and U.S.)
  1. Support data portability
  1. Incorporate website intrusion to data breach reporting process
  • While the GDPR mandate for websites has been clearly laid out, meeting it is easier said than done. With fines for noncompliance enumerated in the regulation (between 4% of global revenues or €20 Million), Revenue and Ad Operations are under pressure from internal risk and compliance professionals to ensure all data elements are documented, assessed, and controlled.
Ignorance is real. So is anarchy.

With such a tall order, it is disturbing that so many overlook the perils of third-party vendor code going unchecked. Publishers desperately need to incorporate digital vendors into their vendor risk management program. Most website/app operators are in the dark about how many direct and indirect vendors contribute to code on their site and who these vendors are, let alone know how many domains and cookies these vendors use to track website visitors.

Digital vendor risk management will highlight the security and compliance gaps inherent in the digital environment. For example, there really isn’t a clear chain of command when it comes to authorizing the presence of third-party vendors executing on a website. The process is fairly decentralized. Departments like marketing, sales/revenue operations, IT, risk and legal all make decisions regarding the vendors they would like to use for various website functionalities. This makes creating accountability challenging, with most issues relegated to the IT and security departments to solve.

Put the “Digital” in Vendor Risk Management

Yes, the odds are stacked against website operators, but creating a holistic digital vendor risk management program isn’t impossible. To create a risk management and GDPR compliance program for your digital properties, you should be able to answer the following:

Within 2 weeks:
  • How many third-party vendors execute in websites/ mobile apps?
  • What are the names of these vendors?
  • What exactly are they doing, i.e., intended purpose and any out-of-scope activity?
Within 1 month:
  • Do I have contracts to authorize vendor scope?
  • How does third-party vendor activity affect overall website/ app performance?
  • What are the risks to data privacy?
  • What is my exposure to regulatory risk via vendor behavior?
Within 3 months:
  • Am I maintaining encryption throughout the call chain?
  • As these vendors change over time, what is the process to identify new vendors and their activity on websites/ apps?
  • If the corporate website isn’t fully secure, is the enterprise network at risk when employees visit the site?

Answering these questions set the stage for creating a comprehensive digital vendor risk process. This can serve as your GDPR compliance mechanism for your digital assets. This doesn’t just make sense for your customers, it will be an essential part of being part of the global digital economy.

Matt O’Neill has been working on the front line of digital advertising in an industry-facing capacity since 1999. Most recently, he has taken on the role of European General Manager for The Media Trust, a US-based digital security and advertising quality assurance company. Matt  strives to generate industry consensus from senior leaders and drive innovation through collaboration. He is a frequent speaker, panelist, and chair at industry conferences including Digiday, IAB, dmexco, The Guardian, AOP (UK), Admangerforum, and corporate-operated events. He is an active advisor and investor for advertising and marketing technology start-up enterprises and a senior partner at AtlanticLeap.

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