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Dialogue is Key to Trust

Marc Gosschalk, AdTruth, partner marketing manager, EMEA, stresses the need for advertisers to be more proactive with consumers on the benefits of the data exchange economy, citing multiple opinions from across the industry.

Last year saw a rapid increase in public awareness of digital privacy and identity, and brought to the fore the question of trust in digital marketing. This begs the question, what can be done in 2015 to improve the relationship between brands and consumers?

Eduardo Ustaran, a lawyer and author of The Future of Privacy, recently hosted a roundtable event, hosted by AdTruth, which asked the following two key questions: what is the most important issue to be addressed in order to increase consumer trust in digital marketing — and how?

The pertinence of these questions and the willingness for discourse was reflected by the guests, with the EDAA, IAB UK, TRUSTe, WFA, Havas, nugg.ad, Rubicon Project and Sanoma around the table, and Change.org amongst those participating online.

Also attending was Eleanor Treharne-Jones, TRUSTe, global PR director, who pointed to Ipsos research which highlighted that:

• 92% of Americans are concerned about their privacy when using the internet and 42% are more concerned than a year ago
• 77% of those who worry about their online privacy moderated their online activity due to their concerns
• 57% didn’t click on an ad due to privacy concerns

Two key themes emerged from the early exchanges: transparency and control.

Trust requires consumer empowerment, which requires transparency
Oliver Gray, EDAA, director general, summed up the consensus when he said: “Transparency is essential so that consumers can understand what data is being used and how it is being used. Greater control will ensure their online and offline experiences are relevant and unintrusive, while greater choice enables users to exercise their views in a simple and beneficial way”.

Yves Schwarzbart, IAB, UK, regulatory affairs manager, supported the sentiment, and further framed the first hurdle facing the industry — the need to educate consumers. He said: “Transparency and control are at the heart of increasing consumer trust in digital marketing. Technology evolves at such a rapid pace that consumers can often feel overwhelmed. Connected consumers don’t automatically make well-informed consumers.”

Being proactive brings rewards
Markus Breuer, nugg.ad, director mobile and emerging channels, believes that proactive communication not only mitigates risk, but builds respect. He said: “We put disclaimers on everything historically, which was very unusual in Germany at that time. We had only 50 complaints. People in the industry are still scared to tell the public what is happening. If you don’t tell them and get caught, it’s a very bad situation. We need to be more open about data collection and not wait until someone makes a scandal out of it.”

This aligned with the position of Nicolas Danet, Change.org, European client manager, who responded on behalf of consumers via an online survey to encourage companies to “look at people's reaction to a lack of transparency as an opportunity to build trust”. Notably, the sentiment was felt by brands also, according to Chris Payne, Public Affairs Manager, WFA.

Education needs better marketing
Orban Büller, Sanoma, mobile advertising developer, led the calls for proactive communication to come in the form of “simple and straightforward transparency in privacy statements”.

Although how can this be achieved, when consumers have so little time to invest in understanding privacy policies?

Joe Prusz, Rubicon Project, head of mobile, said a common language would relieve a major barrier. He added: “It doesn’t help that each industry participant speaks its own language – privacy disclosures don’t map onto each other so when two companies say they do not collect PII, they may mean entirely different things.”

Treharne-Jones went on to cite the novel approach taken by Channel 4 – which created a celebrity-fronted video to explain its privacy policy – as a good example of a business explaining privacy in a way that both engages and educates consumers.

Treharne-Jones went on to suggest that consumers need to understand the benefits to a data exchange, and be able to make informed choices about how relevant their ad experience will be.

Dialogue works both ways
Gray highlighted the importance of transparency not only in how consumers are informed, but also in how consumer preferences can be expressed and understood. That starts with making the questions consumers are asked about data privacy being relevant.

Moreover, it also means actively encouraging consumers to express their preferences, not just providing them with the ability to do so. AdChoices was a well received initiative in empowering the consumer, with good awareness and positive impact on trust—but how can we further drive consumer engagement of such important initiatives, asked Ustaran?

Nugg.ad's Breuer added that a lack of consumer motivation is largely psychological, which could be largely solved by demonstrating the impact of consumer choices immediately.

Incorporate the value exchange into your business model
Building on the ideas of transparency and control, it was suggested that a new more open advertising model should be explored – one that provides a more obvious value exchange for the consumer.

Gray suggested that consumers could be consulted about the adverts they would like to see and place a real monetary value on the experience, enabling them to choose the online experience they would prefer.

Darren Goldie, Havas Media, managing partner, continued with the suggestion that brands such as Spotify – where people can choose to have content for free with adverts, or pay to have the same content without adverts – have introduced innovative business models with a real value proposition that places importance on data and personalisation.

Responsible self-regulation has an important role
When considering top-level approaches to increasing consumer trust, Schwarzbart highlighted the value of flexibility and adaptability that self-regulation has offered in driving an ad-supported internet.

He said: “Self-regulation has proven to create a great amount of added value for users when combined with clear compliance requirements for businesses, and backed-up by an effective and comprehensive consumer recourse system. The digital advertising industry's initiative on interest-based advertising is a good example of successful self-regulation with a global outlook”.

The sentiment was widely approved, but with great attention to the need for self-regulation to be honest and responsible. “If consumers and legislators get the impression that we are just paying lip service to our self-imposed rules, self-regulation's worth drops to near zero," added Breuer.

Meanwhile Gray said: “To be trusted the industry must lead. This has to be more than words or clever privacy notices, it has to be related to mechanisms to exercise control and choice that are meaningful to consumers”.

Collaborative initiatives offer immense potential
Goldie framed the challenge of “transcending perceptions of privacy and data, by rediscovering technology to take consumer choice into effect”.

For Prusz, making it simple for consumers to exercise choice was already a clear imperative: “Companies in the industry, particularly in mobile, employ a host of different opt out mechanisms, from relying on device-specific settings, to manually inputting device IDs, to using independent apps. The industry needs to reach a singular consensus, as it did in display, and it needs to do so soon”.

James Lamberti, AdTruth, general manager, proposed a centralised opt-out database, powered by an ID Management system like AdTruth Resolve, to help make consumer choices universal across their devices and online environments. Meanwhile, Breuer debated the feasibility of such an initiative given international requirements, but there was enough optimism to end the discussion with plans to develop the idea further.

The end… or just the beginning?
The potential for the industry to come up with such creative, collaborative ways to promote transparency and control was one key takeaway from the roundtable. The release of the 2014 Activity Report from the EDAA’s Online Behavioural Advertising Self-Regulatory Programme provides a timely example of this in action.

However, underlying principles of transparency and control was perhaps the simplest message for all those involved in the digital marketing industry: in the words of Danet from Change.org, “Trust can’t exist without dialogue”. The digital industry and consumers alike should be encouraged if this is indeed just the beginning of the conversation.