Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  0:18  

Welcome, everyone. I am Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson, a digital strategist here at BWG Connect. And we are a network knowledge sharing group. That's what we do, we stay on top of the latest trends, challenges, whatever it is that shaping the digital landscape that we love. We are on track to do almost 500 of these webinars this year due to the increase in demand to better understand everything digital, we'll also be doing at least 100 in person small format dinners this year. So if you happen to be in a tier one city, feel free to shoot us an email, and we'd be happy to send you an invite. These dinners are typically 15 to 20 people having a specific discussion around a digital topic. And it's always an awesome time. We have a lot of conversations here at BWG Connect, whether it is through dinners, webinars, phone calls, it's how we generate the topic ideas for future events. And we'd love to have a conversation with you. So feel free to drop me a line at Tiffany@BWGconnect.com. It's from these conversations, we also gain our resident experts, such as Hero Digital and FullContact, who's here today, anybody that we asked to come teach the collective team has come highly recommended from multiple brands within the network. So if you ever need any recommendations on anything in the digital space, feel free to reach out to me happy to provide you a shortlist of the best of the best. And we also know that there's a lot of people hiring right now. So do note that we have a talent agency BWG Talent that we'd be happy to put you in contact with a few housekeeping items, we started a few minutes after the hour. So rest assured, we will wrap up at least five minutes before the end of the hour to give you ample time to get to your next meeting. And the most important part, we want this to be fun, educational, conversational. So do not hesitate to put in the chat. Any questions or comments you may have. If you feel more comfortable, always feel free to reach out to me via email at Tiffany@bwgconnect.com. And we'll be sure to get to them. So with that, let's roll and start the cookieless presents not future where the future is here the present, discovering new ways to collect data and gain insights into your customers. The team at Hero Digital and FullContact have been awesome friends partners of the network. So I'm going to kick it off to you, Kevin and Chris. If you can give intro on yourself and your organization. That'd be great. And then we'll hop into the information. Thank you.

Kevin Lazorik  2:43  

Absolutely Nice to meet everyone and excited to talk about this topic today. It's certainly very something that we started talking about a few years ago. And I feel like I now have conversations about it daily. So I'm Kevin Lazorik. I'm the Senior Vice President of alliances and co founder at Hero Digital and very excited to have one of our strategic partners FullContact here with us today, Chris.

Chris Harrison  3:08  

All right. Thank you, Kevin. And thank you, Tiffany. It's a pleasure spending some time with you today, Kevin, and talking about this topic. Like you said, this seems to be a topic on everyone's mind. And the good brands are really come up with with incredible strategy around how to work in this new economy and especially around identity and how to engage the customers. So as Kevin said, I ended up with FullContact. We are an identity resolution company, we help companies with their identity strategy around their customers. We also work within identity verification and fraud to help companies ensure that the people that are interacting with are real people. They're not bots, or synthetic accounts, but actually the customer that they think they are when they're signing up accounts. So I have deep experience in marketing and adtech since the late 90s. And it came on board full contact several years ago, helping them with the strategy. And it's like I said, it's a pleasure working with you today.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  4:07  

Awesome. Thank you, both. All right, Kevin, I really jump in. Yeah, and I think as we you know, we've been

Kevin Lazorik  4:15  

areas of this trends have been spoken about for quite some time in different areas. It's either that third party cookies are going away, you know, different ad identifiers are going away, and what is Apple blocking versus other things are being allowed. But it's really part of a broader trend towards consumer control of privacy. And in looking at that these tactics and techniques and capabilities that brands particularly you know, marketers have come to rely on have gone away or shifted or will be shifting in the future. And it's not a static shift. It's a much more dynamic environment than it was three, four or five years ago. And so really every brand is now a data company if you want to do that. personalized experience, you want to optimize your your digital channels, your mobile app voice, whatever it might be, you're not as capable of just like, oh, we'll just plug this in. And we have this information. Now. It's a big shift that come with consumer expectations as well, and how brands respond is really how they can differentiate themselves in the future. And so let's just talk about a few of these trends that are driving this today. But if we start by by pausing here, I like to do this in the still somewhat rare occasion, I get to do it in person, I asked for people to guess. But you know, ask yourselves, if you were to say, what percent of US adults openly use at least one privacy tool went online? I will tell you, I get answers from 5% to 50. To 90, it's a pretty wide guess. And the actual answer here is 77%. So 77% of people and this is in 2019, nothing was happening, by default at this point, are using an ad blocker tracking script, blocker, a VPN, something to give themselves some amount of control within that within their digital presence and who they are online. And so a lot of the initial things that you see from, you know, technology companies and others, when it talks about these cookies and you know, tracking going away, they will say, Hey, do people even really care about this? And the answer is, yes, they do, the vast majority do. And this is something that will continue to shift over time. And that gets into really this aspect of a brand when we think about trust, and what trust means as a brand and our relationship with our consumers. And so, Chris, I think this is an area where you can really chime in on like the trust economy and what that means for brands.

Chris Harrison  6:53  

Thanks. Yeah, I mean, if you think about it, I heard someone talking about this recently. So we've only been working on our social norms for centuries. And we're trying to squeeze it into these new digital platforms we built in the last 20 years. So there's a lot that needs to be built yet as it relates to trust. And when you hear the term kind of trust Academy, typically What that's referring to, like the most the most use cases, you might hear things like Airbnb or Uber. So the ability to you know, create a business based on the trust and kind of operationalizing that trust within either an application, an app or the weight or that brand in terms of how that brand works. So the trust economy, I think, is important because I think what you're starting to see as we start thinking about the way things are shifting, with regard to privacy, but also security regulations, and then just the advancement of technology, around identity and in the new social norms as it relates to being online all the time. So we all just went through this huge experiment during the pandemic, where we're working at home, we're online a lot, a lot of the Commerce shifted online, I think the most recent statistic is like $48 trillion of will move into the digital economy over the next decade. So we're going through this massive experiment now. And we're living a lot of our lives, and in all of our economy now online. And within that, we're trying to build up these new foundations of trust. And I think we're still in the very early stages of that journey, in trying to squeeze in our social norms around how we would typically interact with people face to face versus now interacting with companies, brands, and each other online. And so that's a lot of that I'm not going to speak to all of the issues online, but at least as it relates to identity and trust. That's really what we're talking about here. And I think the big kind of mega trend hearing about this kind of the shift from the web one Dotto which is kind of the definition of HTML and URL HTTP to web to Dotto, which is really the advancement in kind of applicant apps and social media etc, to web three Dotto, which, you know, coming from the marketing space is a great marketing term, but the definition is still being figured out, honestly. But what we do know in terms of like, you know, even though we don't have a precise meaning, web three, three data was really what it's trying to refer to as the fact that both identity and content or data and things like that are being decentralized, basically giving more control back to the users back to the people themselves over their digital presence. And so a lot of what we do, the full contact is giving both those those people that consumers are just real people control, but also the brands in which they interact with. So we're constantly kind of trying to dynamically manage, you know, the boundaries or privacy in the brands we're engaging with. And I think what's happened in the past, it's been disintermediated by a lot of other parties trying to manage identity or manage the data on behalf of brands and Consumers are interacting with now what we're trying to do is give control back to the brands and their customers to manage the identity and to manage the, the interaction directly with that customer. And I think what you're going to see as more and more of this, as we start to build up those kind of trust layer underneath our digital economy today, a lot of companies trying to build that, but also relying on other companies, digital trust agents, to help them manage their first party relationships with their customers.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  10:30  

Awesome. And just a friendly reminder to everybody listening, feel free to drop in the chat. Any questions you may have, or feel free to email, a lot of great content here. Thank you. 

Kevin Lazorik  10:42  

And I think that, you know, one of the big factors in trust that we've seen in this trend that's been evolving is the end of third party cookies, right. So this today is one of the most talked about privacy topics that are impacting marketers, obviously, Apple led the way that everyone's been been following suit. And so we'll dive a bit more deeply into this. But it's something that's on everyone's mind as we're going through these. And really, why is it impacting people? So if you look at, you know, browser adoption, across the board, yes, Chrome, which does still support third party cookies, by default, is half of the total market share within the US. But if you step into mobile, you know, we in the US, the majority of people tend to have an Apple device and listings are blocked. So that's where we started shifting from like the cookieless. Future to cookieless. Present. This is today, right now, if you're heavily dependent on third party cookies for retargeting and other capabilities, it's not happening on the majority of mobile devices here in the US, and this trend will continue to get tighter. So a quote that I love. And then here's from David, senior vice president Mozilla, when they followed suit and copied, copied but modeled after what Apple did with blocking third party cookies is, the quote is expecting users to spend their time understanding privacy implications, rather than using the web they want to use is not the best path. So this end user centric perspective is because it's not grabbing hold, it has grabbed hold, and is continuing to go and gain traction. So as brands, this is a perspective that will win over time. What does our user want? And how are we meeting that need will never serve you wrong as a brand as a marketer, as an organization that's trying to be client first. And that's, you know, an example of really, I think we're leading brands are starting to differentiate. We did talk about Chrome does still support these, there was a plan that was going to be all wrapped up by the end of this year, it's now looking towards middle of 2023, that this will be phased out as they look and sort of formalizing of Google's want to replacing it. But the I think people are starting to understand the like, oh, Google gave us an extension, we still have time. No, you don't like at Google's the only one really remaining standing in that in that camp. And even then they're moving away. And it's going to be sort of an iterative move. So the future is now these are, you know, act like they're gone. And you'll be ready as you move forward. The other key element to recognize within all these topics is that as more and more data that we use to consider non PII is starting to be classified potentially as PII. And so there's various amounts of government regulation, we all know GDPR. We've all we've all lived through that. But you know, CCPA, the California Consumer Privacy Act is a big one. But Massachusetts, New York, Hawaii, Maryland, this is just a short list, you know, there's a vast number of states who are rolling out their own opportunities. And some of these are ones where it would be, you know, some the like Hawaii and Maryland, for example, suits can be bought by the Attorney General. But in California, Massachusetts, New York, the way these are written is that an individual could bring this against a company if their data was mismanaged. So there's a lot of changes and we talked about of carrots and what it can mean if we really have embraced this, but there's some sticks as well. If the government is starting to change what PII is, the responsibilities that brands have in managing this data, if they have it, and to really owning that moving forward is a key change for brands to go and embrace. This isn't a one time let's drop some script that people opt into cookies and we're good. Now there's a lot more consideration that needs to go into a lot of these changes.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  14:46  

And PII is personal identifiable information.

Kevin Lazorik  14:50  

That's correct. Personally Identifiable Information, any piece of data that can tie back to an individual and that's where, if you have way too sometimes or Zombie data, no guy that you don't want, maybe you're a well established ran 20 or 30 years ago, some systems somewhere that was good to ask for people's social security numbers, and you have no need for them in your business, they might still be living somewhere. And that's a problem, right? So those types of things are things that all brands are looking forward to, and how do they manage that. And so just to do it slightly deeper dive into third party cookies and why they're a problem and ultimately comes down to consent. We use it apps we use for data, we have to opt in to information, third party cookies, the way they work is you don't someone, no site can drop that cookie on there, and then follow you around other places around the web and know what you're doing. And you never said, I'm okay with that, right. And there might be certain aspects that you're okay with, we all like getting the right product recommended to us, I think that streamlines our journey of what we're trying to get done. But that lack of consent of what's being collected, and what's being done with it is ultimately what led to this change. And if you think about how, you know, studies have shown that you can identify 87% of the people in the US if you know, five digit ZIP Code, gender, and date of birth. So those three data points that you identify at 7% of the people. And you can just imagine what little bits of other pieces of data, you can go to go and easily complete out that final 13%. And so, you know, if you're someone like me, and you've been to wind.com, before, it's like, yeah, I've pretty much had to give you all the information just to get on the site. Right? So this focus on what do you know about me is a big topic. And so this focus on how the exploits that you know, that relevant information is that lack of opt in is really the blocker that led to the shift that we're all going through and reacting today. And I always like to call out that sort of consent and opt in and clarity around what you're asking for from data, how you're going to use the data, because that's something that is really a big part of how people are now starting to look at what do you ask for and why I got my very first iPhone, it was like we'd like to have your logo your didn't even ask for location. I think if I remember correctly, you just have it then they like cool me know your location, like Yeah, sure. Why does this, you know, part where did I park my car app need all this other data besides my location, the neck that comes in. And so there is a real impact on marketers here. So ad targeting and retargeting. The common techniques you do today are much more difficult, right? So some of the metrics you're going to use around that for measurement and attribution are also going to shift. So yes, Google has a privacy sandbox and worked with other API's for things they can do within there to help with that, but you know, our default thinking of oh, this is the metric we're looking for, those numbers are going to be evolving of what like a good metric is around that, depending on your industry and some of the things that that you're using. And then lastly, marketing tool changes. So we're, it's very unique, where a lot of times within technology, we have a number of different ways of doing things that evolve to a set of standards, right? This is one of the few cases maybe only case, where we're sort of going in the opposite direction, we have a standard way. And now all these ad tech companies, other marketing solution, companies are looking at how they're gonna go and solve these capabilities. So if you're a marketer, you know, talk with your your vendors, your technology vendors of what they're doing to address this, because there's no single silver bullet way to say, Oh, I was doing this, I'm gonna do this. Now, there are some real ways that we'll get into in a few, a few minutes that will help there. But it's not a Oh, you're doing a now we do B and everything's the same. It's a bigger shift than that. And lastly, to highlight on, you know, the customer being in control. This is a survey that Forrester did in 2020, where they said, Well, what would motivate you to share more information with companies? And the first answer is nothing. You have enough about me already. Why would I give you any more?

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  19:13  

As number two is cache? No, pay me? Give me Give me that that data.

Kevin Lazorik  19:19  

And maybe some brands have unique ways they can do that elsewhere. But then you get into, I think, some of the more actionable responses. So loyalty programs, if you have a loyalty program today, or thinking about rolling one out, it's a really unique opportunity for people who are going to be sharing more information about themselves, you can incentivize them, giving you information on how they're going to use. I think the next bullet is a really interesting one have the choice to opt out in the future. So hey, I'll give you this information about myself that could be helpful in what I'm trying to do right now. A year or two from now I might be less willing to share that information. So if I have an opt out, that level of control is what would go and shape some My thinking. So those are all different ways. When you think about your audience, why are your audiences engaged with you what's going to resonate with them can really vary. But there are, you know, incentives that you can put in place as a brand, besides just will pay for the data to go and help and augment the those needs. But with that, you know, Chris, I'd love to hand to you of, you know, what are some more specific things that brands can be doing, as they're looking around? What they're doing with their data, customer expectations around privacy and how that's shifting?

Chris Harrison  20:35  

Yeah, thanks. So I think you hit on a couple of terms that I think, you know, a lot of marketers are hearing over and over again, one is, you know, we mentioned personally identifiable information, and we also talk about first party. So I think there's a, there's a big difference, obviously, we're talking about third party cookies, but we're really not talking about the fact that you know, you still need to have a good close relationship with your customers. And building up that first party relationship is incredibly important. gaining their trust, make sure that you're being transparent, in terms of how you are collecting data, what you're using that data for, as well as the partnerships you have in terms of who you're going to be, you know, making that data visible to, I think what you're going to see more and more of with with brands is a lot more collaboration. I mean, we're seeing it both across brands, to brands, but brands, technology companies and digital trust agents, you know, like, like full contact, and even, you know, public private type of collaboration. So, we're still trying to work out, you know, a lot of how to build the trust and creating the technology to build the trust with consumers. But the first thing starts with, you've got to have good brand integrity, and the ability to give your your customers the ability to opt in or out, give or revoke consent, and understand through your transparency, how you've collected that data, what are you using it for, and allow them to change those boundaries? when need be? And I think this goes beyond just consent management, but also goes into, are you working with other companies that are aligning to your privacy policies? are you exposing that to your customers to make sure that they understand that as well. And then there's a lot of other I think, additional what I'd say more web three Dotto typo abilities that you can think about in terms of context, influencer marketing, and other types of things that are happening with regard to digital identifiers, etc, that allows the consumer to actually be in more control of the personal data, and who they are willingly giving that information to, if, if they give the proper value exchange. And so I think a lot of that is happening. And so I'll go through a little bit of the historically here, as we mentioned, a lot of the data being collected is happening through other platforms, third party platforms, social being one of the primary, but there's other types of platforms as well, that are that are collecting that data. And it's not necessarily the direct interaction of the customer to the brand that they're engaging with, you know, throughout, let's say, through a commerce transaction. So what's happening, like I mentioned before, is, you know, that relationship is, is being disintermediated by third parties. And so in that, you know, it was working well, we were able to engage in, and especially with our digital advertising, be able to reach a large audience, but there was very little permissioning that was happening there. Within that exchange, and less transparency, there really wasn't a great understanding of who was getting that information and what they were using it for beyond that explicit boundary extension to the brand that I like that I'm engaging with. So what's changing now obviously, as I mentioned, is we need to be able to give more controls back to brands, in order to give them back to the customer that they're engaging with. And then, you know, as you know, we give consumers more control. The other thing you start to see is things like the creator economy emerging, where the consumer is now in more control of the content, they're creating, the data they're creating. And they may choose to monetize that information as they see fit. And so we think of creator economy, a lot of people think of Etsy, you know, the fact that I'm creating something that we have the ability to kind of manage my own personal brand, in a much more explicit way and monetize it, but the creator economy can extend well beyond that. So I think there's gonna be more tools for people to actually monetize that data. And in the meantime, as that starts to emerge, I think you've got to build up that first party relationship, and to honor the permissions that you have from the customer then what you're interacting with, and the first party data strategies also, when we talk about this in the context of privacy, oftentimes security matters too. So it's not just, you know, do I, am I capturing the consent? Or am I capturing permission or opt in for different types of interactions with customers? Am I also securing that data? You know, am I actually kind of reducing the amount of data that I'm managing, in order to reduce the blast radius of potential identity theft, or breach of information. So security matters there, too. So if I'm, you know, if I'm a brand, and I'm interacting with my customers, I'm not just thinking about the regulations that I have to abide by. But also I have to build trust, give control and secure that to be a good steward of the data in which I'm managing. All these are really important strategies in terms of controlling data and giving, giving control back to the consumers. Yeah, so I think you know, and I touched on this just briefly there, but balancing the need to build first party data, versus the risks of PII. So again, PII is personally identifiable information, a lot of companies that personal data is toxic. So if you think about, it's like, if I, if I'm collecting a lot more data than I really need, then I'm increasing the risk to my brand, I'm increasing the risk to the consumer as well. So what a lot of companies are starting to do is reducing the risk of managing that by taking that information and putting it aside if they're encrypting it, or letting someone else manage the pie itself, allowing me what I do best, which is giving the customer a great experience as a brand. So there's a lot of ways to do this. I mean, there but but primarily at the, you know, it's minimalizing, the type of information you're collecting or storing. And if you do collect things that are of higher risk or higher data classification from a risk perspective, then use encryption in order in order for you to be able to store that in a way that is not accessible, easily accessible by, you know, prying eyes, and then minimalizing, the weight, the number of people who can actually access that. So that's an important part of the strategy too. The other thing is, if you're exchanging data with partners, what are less risky ways to exchange data? And I'll talk about a few of those. But are there ways in which you don't actually have to exchange the API to be able to exchange insights? Or can you introduce you know, certain types of information to the exchange so that there's no way in order to be able to D anonymize the information and get back to the individual. So these are all ways to reduce the risk of managing personal data.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  27:36  

That's awesome. Friendly Reminder, put in your questions, comments, and then chat or feel free to email me. This is great information. 

Chris Harrison  27:43  

Yeah, I wanted to just double click on the the content creators of the crater economy a little bit. So. So again, what is the creator economy. So it's basically, you know, it's it emerges from the dialogue, you might hear around web three Dotto, but it basically means that the users are getting more control of their data. This is leading to more of the creator economy. And this is basically the ability for you to monetize your personal brand, or your hobbies, etc. And having in this case, the ability to monetize it in a way that you own the relationship directly, because you're creating the content. So these imagine like a celebrity and their direct interaction with their fan base. But there's a lot of companies will be very interested in understanding the fan bases themselves, I have direct access to them, or go through or work through influencer marketing, or the ability to understand how across different types of artists or celebrities etc. are athletes. Actually, how many of those audiences actually overlap very interesting insight. But again, it's it's less orchestrated by the platform's more orchestrated by the actual content creator themselves. And so we see this as a big emerging trend. And you can imagine as a brand, this is very interesting information on not just depending on modeled data to try to figure out the likes and interests of people. But I now have directly observed information from the people, they're interacting with the content creator themselves, over what their likes and interests are in that audience and direct access to that audience for my brand. So this is one emerging trend, which we're paying a lot of attention to right now. And working with some companies to help them, you know, work, you know, participate with their brand in terms of deepening the relationships through the content creators themselves. And honestly, getting back to the people who are creating a lot of what is happening in the digital economy itself. Very cool. Yeah. And so one of the ways we're doing this, and I want to, I just want to talk about the technology a little bit because it goes back to protection of the data itself. Basically using cleanroom activities. In real technology, so there's a lot of a lot of emerging companies within this particular category. It's actually a concept that's been around for decades, which is the ability for two independent entities. In this case, we use an example like an artist, and a brand, to be able to actually see the overlap between, you know, their customers, or fans, using cleanroom technologies means that they're not actually giving their data away to someone else, let's say, another partner entity, but they're using an intermediary like full contact to help them do that. And then they share the insights on both sides as long as there's permission to do so. So they can share insights. So they can actually use those insights actually, to reach those audiences online, either through social media or other types of digital media. So this is a big trend. I think a lot of companies, like I said, are thinking less about third party and more of our second party, kind of how can they exchange insights? How can they make sure that insight is actually done in a way to protect personal identity or personal data, but also be very transparent about who their partners are, and that those partners align with their privacy policies. So very big trends, I think it is very important for marketers to pay attention to. So what are some other things that are newer capabilities, you know, that are emerging with regards to the space mean, I think one of the things that I wanted to talk about here is, is kind of the the megatrend, also just around identity. So it's not just that, you know, we talked about things like giving control over etc, to the user to the brand, etc. But also these bigger concepts of what is happening with with identity in general. So you've got really three different types of identity that we're all dealing with simultaneously, right now, because we haven't completely adopted kind of earth or fast forward toward towards a user, customer centric model of identity management. So what you still have today as you have siloed identity, so that's when you know, the let's say your credentials, or the information itself is kind of managed to buy the domain or the company in which you're interacting with, that's a very traditional way of kind of managing identity. But the second would be federated identity. And so think of like single sign on as a federated identity. So you saw a lot of companies like, you know, Apple, Google, Facebook, introduced the single sign on types of capabilities, where the companies that are using them, can embed them because they they've agreed on the the interoperability of that technology itself, what the user experience is, like, what's being you know, who's going to be controlling that identity itself, etc. And so that's been adopted, you see a lot more that we're all experiencing that with those with single sign on, but that's a federated identity. And then you have decentralized identity, which is what I've been alluding to is kind of the trend is where we're moving towards the kind of web three Dotto trends, where that is where the individual is interacting directly with the brand, but probably managing controlling their own identity over time, perhaps they have a digital wallet, or some sort of electronic identifier online or digital identifier, but they're kind of managing it. And typically, that's reliant on maybe a device, or other types of ways in which they're managing their identity. So the really confusing thing, I think, for marketers and everyone else, is that all three of these are in existence simultaneously, right? You have siloed identity, you've got you know, federated identities, and you've got decentralized identity trends that are starting to emerge. So I think for a brand, what's really important is they have to be able to maintain their identity itself, but also, I think, use what I would call digital trust agents. So that's a company like FullContact, or others that are doing things like identity verification, or doing things like building out identity graphs for you on your behalf. So that you can always maintain that identity over time, but persistent identifier, secure the PII enable the insights without actually letting data or personal data leak, but also be able to do true kind of measurement at for across all of your customers, and over time, and be able to recognize those customers as well. So I think it's very important that we understand that this is a very dynamic time as it relates to identity. Or what I can say for certain is that you have to be able to manage your first party data in the identity around your customers in you have to pay attention to that as relates to these things, security, privacy, as well as the ability to do data exchange in a privacy, by design way. So that's what we talk about when we say private Identity Cloud. It's actually your ability within your company to manage identity in a privacy safe way, by give you as much fidelity as you can around recognition to your customers and the maintenance of that Id over time. So in protecting the person Little data through all the operations of your business and staying in compliance of all the ever changing laws. That's right. Yeah. Are you keeping track of privacy within some sort of permission ledger, for example? Are you actually exchanging information with downstream partners, or you have some form of governance around those partners to ensure that they are abiding by those same standards in which you've collected that data from from your customer. So all of that is important, being able to wrap that into a solution to allow you to ensure that you're you have a stable privacy foundation or ballast behind your business.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  35:39  

Okay, there's a very well timed slide to the question that we had in the audience of how do you collect the data digitally? And I think that's a perfect segue into this discussion.

Chris Harrison  35:50  

Yeah, I mean, so data collection, I mean, so I think there's, there's not one data collection mechanism, right? There's a number of different ways you collect data, it could be through, for example, collecting an opt in for an email, and then sending emails and collecting data about those emails, as they open and click on those emails, it could be through digital advertisement, being able to buy advertisement against an audience. And you may or may not have insight into the specifics around the audience itself, depending on their platform. So how do you collect that data in a way to make it usable? I mean, I think what I'm highlighting in the previous slide was just basically, whenever you're collecting PII or personal data, you want to be able to have a standard way in which that data is being protected, protected. Well, so for example, when we help our customers facilitate that when data is being collected, we actually encrypted and transfer you encrypted or encrypted at rest, and then you protect the keys themselves. And then you limit the exposure who gets access to those keys. And then any identifier you use from that point forward, is it reversible, so you can't actually look at the identifier and recognize it in the end of the identity of the individual. And there's no logic in which you can actually reverse it back to the individual and recognize them, or D anonymize them in any way. So these are all really important standards, turn to your collection, immediately on board, that data collection through mechanisms like that, no matter where you're collecting it. So anyway, that's a few, a few insights there. And then, you know, web recognition, one of one of the reasons for this is just to point out that what third party cookies are going away first party cookies or not, it's really important for you to build up a capability around first party data collection, specifically on the web, and for it to be able to recognize returning customers, to returning businesses, to your site, etc. And so that will still be there, as well as the ability for you to partner with other companies to help you do this, you know, leverage additional insights, you know, into that recognition to be able to give them a better experience. And that's really what you're trying to do is to say, hey, as a customer, I recognize you've engaged with my brand before, and I recognize that you're in the middle of doing something, and we want to help you complete that task. Or I want to recognize that you're an important customer. And that there might be things that I have ways in which I can serve you better, or in a different way than I had in the past. And so recognition is still important. The ability to recognize those customers, and you want to get each product, you want to try to split that, you know, in terms of like anonymous and known and try to get above 50%, in terms of the recognition in terms of your site is really kind of a benchmark for us in terms of helping our customers.

Kevin Lazorik  38:44  

That's great. So as we look at you know, what are some key things I would, you know, want everyone to take away from from this call the first ze hopefully, sir, drove on begins at the end is already here, the Google's extension is not giving you extra runway, you know, we're at the end, the majority of, you know, other adopted browsers are no longer accepting these. So just start acting like they're already gone. Because in many cases, within different business use case you might be relying on things like third party cookies is, has already arrived. Next, no regulation will continue to increase there, it's coming and there will be more. And particularly in the US market, I think it'll be critical, because it's gonna differ from state to state to state, there's nothing really at the federal level at the moment. So you'll when companies are, you know, serving people throughout the world and certainly throughout the United States, it's just gonna be a continued focus and at times challenges navigating that so just prepare yourselves and look at it that way. Because it talks about no more data is going to be classified as PII so embracing that security and trust and privacy around any data you are collecting and make sure it's data you really need. If you don't need it, this crisp When it out, you're really just building up risk without the reward of how you're going to optimize an experience for your customer. And you can go and take some actions, right. So privacy is a marketing imperative. Forrester, in some research they did last year that said that 40% of the privacy leaders are going to report into the CMO. They're expecting 100% increase in regulatory and legal activities. I think that that's pretty clear. And that CMOs are, you know, heavily investing in consent, preference management and other software around this privacy trend, because it really is part of the relationship you have with your customers. And so the user expectations are going to continue to evolve, and they're not going to become more open, consumers are continuously getting more and more focused on what their data is, who has it and who they're allowing to have it. So just embracing that. And leading with that is the way to go. And embrace of transparency. It's not that people don't want personalization, people understand that for you to personalize, you have to know something about me. So customers know that. They're not against that, but it is a spectrum of what you know, and how you're using it. And there's really great examples of brands, who, yes, on the side, they have to have the full legalese, of, you know, what they're talking, you know, what they're collecting and why. And, you know, then the legal speak, but there's brands like ClassDojo, which does education software does a really good example of this, of, hey, what's our policy on data? What are we collecting? How are we using it? And why? Who's the team that manages this policy, and they actually have everything of the faces of, here's the people, here's the leader from technology, here's the legal from legal, here's our outside advising group around this, so that they know you're really embracing this and sharing what they have, because people will then trust you to say, Okay, well, if you're doing this that way, and that will help me in this way, in the experience, I get the recommendations I get how you're streamlining the journey that I have, it will be meaningful to your customer relationship. And then, you know, as you said, you're a data company. And so this isn't just oh, how do I collect more, it's collecting scripts, my managing, securing, and having everything that's part of, you know, being coming, that's going to own a lot more first party data that for some brands, maybe many brands, much more than they have been used to in the past. And so really embracing just what that means and what that will entail. And then there's no silver bullet. Right. So Chris, I think, you know, if you want to elaborate on some of the strategies, and recapping those.

Chris Harrison  42:45  

Yeah, thanks, Kevin, I think so we hit on a lot of that, right, just there. And I just want to also recognize that some questions in the in the chat around just to clarify some of this. So just to be clear, if I haven't been clear, you need to be spending a lot of attention. And a lot of your capital investment on building first party relationships, part of the building, that first party relationship is making sure that you're being transparent, and building trust with your customers, it's so that you're giving them a value exchange, and they're able to share some information about themselves, including what they buy from you, obviously, that you're you're keeping track of as well, and how they're interacting with you so that you can better service them. So as it relates to creating that first party experience with your brand, then you can still use first party cookies that are not going away, those are still going to be available, think of like anything within your domain as a company, you will still be able to do that. Now there are regulations around whether you're giving the consumer permission to be for you to be able to collect information, which you need to pay attention to. So part of that first party data collection, whether you're doing it through a cookie, or whether you're doing it through a form or live in person types of data collection, anything you're doing, there ought to be an ability for that consumer to opt out of that data collection. And you ought to be making it very transparent in terms of how you're using it. So just want to be, you know, clear on that, given some of the some of the questions in the chat that yeah, that is where you should be investing a tremendous amount right now is building those first party relationships. And then I do think kind of getting technically deeper, building second party relationships. So the ability for you to partner with other companies, or other digital trust agents, to be able to expand your technical capabilities as to as a relationship to that information that could be securing that data, how to do safe data transfer, how to do things like clean room activities, those kinds of things to ensure that you're complying with regulations, but also complying with the wishes of your consumers. Make sure you're storing and can retrieve the permissions the consumer gives you gives to you or revokes from you. These are all really important technologies and Then where to be looking in the future is maybe consider how do you engage with, you know, content creators, and there's audiences through influencer marketing or other types of techniques to be able to reach audiences that, you know, that might be harder to Harder, harder to have reached in the past or just intermediated by the platforms like social media platforms, that's a rich set of emerging data you can use to understand consumers better.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  45:26  

Just to clarify, one of the questions was, as a marketer, I can still drop cookies on the customer, customers browser, as long as they opted in for that.

Chris Harrison  45:37  

Yeah, anything within your domain. And so in this case, the consumer in you, you know, as you're interacting on your website that's in your domain, you can drop a cookie to be able to keep track of that. So that happens all the time. If you'd like abandon the shopping cart, you know, and you go back to that website, and you can see that your the thing that you're interested in the product is still in that shopping cart, the way you keep track of that is basically by dropping your own first party cookie. Okay.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  46:04  

Thank you. Great. So

Kevin Lazorik  46:08  

that's everything that we had to present today. We're happy to address any additional questions in the final few minutes that we have.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  46:16  

Yeah, we do have a couple more here from the audience. So one is from Megan advertising partners have pivoted to setting their three P cookies to first party on brand websites to avoid three P blocking they expire after seven days. But this will, but this will help s3 P cookies go away? Correct?

Chris Harrison  46:38  

Yeah, so basically third party managed cookies, versus being able to basically what you're doing here is you're actually working as a partner with it, you know, that advertising partners. So there's, I think there's a difference between allowing third parties to manage the data collection itself and identity, which is kind of that's the traditional third party kind of cookie landscape. Whereas you're working with a brand partner or an advertising partner where you're actually establishing the cookie, there are expirations. And by the way, that kind of also is much more dependent on the how often an individual is actually clearing out their cookies too. But yes, that's going to help because anytime you can actually create partnerships, and manage, you know, through those partnerships, but managed on a cookie within your own domain, which is what you're describing here. That's going to help you keep that identity alive for the individual on your website.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  47:35  

Awesome. And just to confirm, we can share this recording, will we be able to share the presentation deck? Yes, that's okay. Perfect. So we'll follow up with that as well. For those that would be interested. Kevin, I think this would be geared towards you and increase you can chime in as well is what's your advice to brands that are hosting a lot of PII within their infrastructure currently, what do they do with that? Well,

Kevin Lazorik  48:06  

I think private is okay what what type of brand are you if you're a financial institution? There's probably a lot of good reasons why you need all that that PII right, or if you're, you know, even something like a financial adviser and knowing how many children I have, and this all become relevant when you start skewing towards healthcare that can be relevant. Retail it can be relevant for personalizing, but how relevant is it? So I think the first thing that I always look at is, what do you have? Why do you have it? And what value does it provide to you? And if there's PII data that you have that you say, We're never going to activate anything on this? And you should look at like, okay, is this data that we should retire and remove from from our systems is sort of the first piece, you know, make sure that the data that you have is data that is relevant to your business relevant to the experiences that you're providing? And then relevant to what the customers are looking for. So that we'll get rid of, hopefully zombie data of stuff, that's all risk and no reward as step one? And then beyond that is, okay, where do you have overlaps? Or do you have silos, things that FullContact can do to help connect some of the silos of PII data. Also, platforms like customer data platforms are very much organized around how do we connect these but then also have permissions and layers on top of them. So I can't go in as an employee and start saying, like, oh, show me everything about Chris, you have to have all the controls around that. So where that is trickier is if you've been around for awhile, and you'd have a database of information that was built a while ago that's been filled up. Looking at the controls, nodded ability of that and then as Chris mentioned, how do you secure that? Can you encrypt it? Can you make it where it's stone, kind of black box that you can't See and without the right access, but can still make the data actionable. So there's a number of ways and solutions to approach that. But that's how I would start. I

Chris Harrison  50:09  

would, I would say, it's to add to that, I would do a data asset assessment, if you haven't done that already. classify your data. And then specifically for, you know, personal data, personal identifiable data. So PII or any type of identifier, I would try to find a way, which is what we were describing through the private Identity Cloud to encrypt fat and put it to the side and replace it with a non reversible identifier. And so that way, you're still able to do your personalization where possible, and you're still doing your measurement. And you can use that identifier anywhere in your systems, but you're not allowing that identity to leak outside of your systems. So that's what we recommend.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  50:52  

Fantastic. Chris, do you want to touch upon investing in a server? Question?

Chris Harrison  51:01  

Yeah, apologies. I tried to answer that in the q&a. Hopefully, that worked. But so the question was, would you use kind of, you know, partner API's to do like conversion tracking? I think that's the way I interpret the question, if that wasn't what was meant, I apologize. But yeah, I would do that. So I think I'm a big believer, obviously, in first party interaction with the customers. And I'm a big believer having strong partnerships. And I think you've got to pick and choose your partners that align your privacy policy, once you've done that, you can use that server to server connection, which is what we're talking about here, like you're making on the back end a connection to their system. And you're you have an ability to share data where appropriate, and one of the things you can do is share signals in terms of the interaction with that customer, so that they can keep track of things like conversions, and vice versa, by the way, they can also send you information back to you. So yes, I would, I would consider that.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  51:53  

Okay. So there's a lot of change in this idea of like, Now, everybody is a data house, and marketers have to be involved in the data and hats are shifting. So what do you think will be the skill set of a CMO five years from now versus today?

Kevin Lazorik  52:15  

The poor CMOS over the past decade, you know, they, you know, when we started hero eight plus years ago was you know, CMOs were all of a sudden spending more on technology than it was right. And I think that's kind of bounced out as it became more of a growth partner. And hey, we'll fix this, but we will help you achieve those goals. And I think that right now, with privacy, we're seeing a lot of that just land on the CMO to start. And so I think that the CMO role over the past decade and looking into the next five years, is one that is much more dynamic, much more than lead generation and pipeline creation and revenue to brand relationship with the customers. And so what are all the factors that go into that? And that there's a lot and obviously those are things that lead to the key KPIs that CMOs are measured against, but I think privacy but as a part of what is our relationship with our customers, and how is that relationship, strengthening with our existing customers, and establishing and growing with new customers is ultimately the mandate that CMOs are being asked to respond to and embracing the privacy change and just trends of web three, and how what decentralization means for your business doesn't always mean blockchain doesn't always mean those things. But really the disconnection of those different capabilities is the challenge that CMOS will have to continue to solve for in terms of how they engage how technology supports that engagement, and all the privacy and communication plays in that relationship. To be interesting,

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  53:56  

it's never a dull moment in this world that we're in is it supposed to be?

Chris Harrison  54:00  

Yeah, it's there's a lot of challenges on CMOS right now. I mean, I'm actually optimistic actually think that a lot of what we're talking about right now, we're all going to innovate, that's what we're doing right now is we're creating those new foundations of trust in the way we interact. Once that starts to kind of disappear and become invisible and just become the fabric of kind of the digital interaction. The CMO, really at that point, you know, can go back to being, you know, really good at the anthropology really good at the creative creativity. And that's really what we need is closer human connection. And I think the CMO can lead the way there. But right now, there's a tremendous amount of burden to understand web three Dotto privacy regulation, that technology changes the different types of interactions with customers through digital media. That's a lot to understand. And so I'm really hoping that we help elevate all of this. So just becomes part of the background of how we all interact. So the CMO can really focus more on the human connection.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  55:00  

Wonderful, well, fantastic information today. both Kevin and Chris, we greatly appreciate all the Intel, we definitely encourage a follow up conversation with the Hero Digital and FullContact team. And we'd like to have a conversation with you. That's how we get ideas for future content for future webinars and in person events. So don't feel free to feel free to reach out and we'll make the connection. So with that, happy Monday, you all thank you for joining. Have a great week. Stay safe and we will see you on the next event. Thank you.