In this opinion piece, Rafael Aquino, head of ad tech and media activation at L’Oréal, discusses how advertisers can improve trust in data ownership, transparency and safety. He looks at cases for both traditional and new privacy-first solutions, investigating how we can truly build a privacy-first world.

Before I start, I have one piece of advice: think about privacy issues as the end user, not as a professional. It’s easy to get distracted by solutions that promise targeted advertising while overlooking people's privacy rights. Often, these solutions may technically comply with privacy regulations, but fail to address the public's long-standing call to stop using personal data indiscriminately. In my review, I will explore ways to improve trust in areas surrounding data ownership, transparency and safety.

Delivering on people’s trust

According to OneTrust's 2024 Trending Toward Trust report, only 30% of consumers believe businesses handle their data responsibly. To build that trust, we need to address three points: 

1. We must explicitly and clearly disclose what we’re doing with people’s information

2. We need to offer an easy way for people to reject the use of their data

3. We have to do as we promised.

Take a leaf out of Ogilvy’s book, literally

In Ogilvy for Advertising, 1983, David Ogilvy said “I believe in a concept that is less well-known today: the idea of respecting your audience.” Ogilvy always highlighted the importance of treating your audience with respect and understanding them beyond the statistics; “they are people with feelings and emotions.” 

In the pursuit to know our public we did the opposite. We saw them as large data sets and lost their respect along the way.

In his book, Ogilvy defends the need to know your audience through research and insights. But isn’t this the issue? How can we understand our audience when it has become harder to collect their information? Let’s explore two cases below.

The case for traditional advertising

For decades, we’ve been trying to understand people’s behaviour to improve brand performance. For years we developed robust research techniques like interviews, feedback forms and even simple observational studies. These techniques are still available and supported by reputable businesses like Nielsen.

Although these techniques don’t allow individual targeting, consumer research will reveal your audiences’ interests and behaviours. The easiest way to use this is through contextual advertising. Brands can go even further by collaborating with media owners to create content that will gather the groups of people you want to advertise to.

These techniques are incredibly effective but have their limitations, notably, on attribution.

The case for new privacy-first solutions

It is very difficult to judge which solutions really deliver on my three points (ownership, transparency and safety). I’m especially concerned with fingerprinting or universal IDs which are often invasive and don’t fully address people’s cry for privacy.

Googles Privacy Sandbox is a very elegant solution as it stores people’s interests and preferences on their browser rather than in centralised databases. I would, however, argue most people wouldn’t see this as a massive improvement on privacy.

The use of First party data (including for Conversion APIs) is possibly the best way to keep hold on targeted advertising. The key here is that people should share their information with you willingly, because they like your brand. You also need to ensure that people have full control of their information (ownership), that they know exactly what happens with it (transparency) and that it is kept in the most secure way (safety).

Multidisciplinary collaboration, new players and conclusion

Privacy projects are extremely complex. For large companies it will involve four teams, Media, IT, Privacy and Data. I created the Ad Tech function at L’Oréal when I realised these teams could benefit from expertise in complex Media and Ad Tech subjects.

It’s also important to find new partners with fresh ways of thinking. Two spring to mind: Odore, a customer acquisition business that helps brands collect data through lead-gen, sampling and advocacy in a transparent way. And Portal, a session-level analytics platform that bridges the gap in eRetail sites with clear user consent. 

In conclusion, we should respect people’s call for privacy by abiding by the principles of data ownership, transparency and safety. I urge all professionals to scrutinise each solution and ensure you’re happy as the end user. This way we can truly start building a privacy-first world.