Data and Young People: How GDPR could save marketers’ relationship with the 20-something consumer
As marketers, we’re always excited about the amount of data that is available to us about our audiences. Understanding the behaviour, motivations, age, locations and propensity to buy our products and services is a hugely valuable resource and is central to the way we plan and buy media for our clients, as demonstrated by OnAudience’s forecast that the UK data market is expected to reach £1.1bn this year.
We tend not to consider what our audiences actually think of us using all this data to reach them, instead focusing on how excited we think they will be to see our ad, served specially to them because of the information they’ve shared online.
When we do stop to consider what audiences might think of the way we use data, generally we agree they must be pretty open to the idea of sharing it with us in the first place — especially younger audiences who have grown up with the internet and social media and are therefore more savvy, and less cautious, about sharing data.
Right?
With the introduction of GDPR just weeks away I decided to talk to my peer group of mid-20-year olds to see what they really think about how the data collected by brands, publishers and platforms is used.
The first thing I discovered about this group of highly-desirable (by marketing standards anyway) millennials is they are convinced their phones are covertly listening to them. When asked what data they think is being collected about them, the same friends answer ‘everything’. As a catch-all phase, ‘everything’ is not that useful but it does demonstrate their view that they have little control over what data is collected and how.
However — and here’s the nub — they all agreed to varying degrees that, broadly, it’s a reasonable trade-off not only for being able to access platforms and publisher content for free but also for seeing advertising which is relevant to them.
Irrelevant advertising is, in fact, deemed so irritating that it mostly negates their concerns about sharing data. They understand that in return they see something they are more interested in. This is, after all, the Netflix and Spotify generation — they are surrounded by algorithms that give them exactly what they want and find it frustrating when brands don’t get it right.
Despite asserting that brands collect data on ‘everything’ about them, my friends are still convinced their phones must be listening to them in order to deliver such incredibly relevant ads based on the conversation they had yesterday, or even five minutes ago. All of them could list examples of when they’d seen ads that were so relevant to face-to-face conversations that it was beyond the realms of coincidence. So, is there still an element of naivety about exactly what ‘everything’ encompasses?
They understand that their age, gender, location and purchasing habits are all collected, but are less aware that everything they ever deleted on Facebook — the content they have posted about, as well as what they have publicly shared in the form of birthdays, relationship status and so on — is also collected. Despite being savvy about the fact that data is constantly being collected on us, I still think most people would be staggered as to quite how much is amassed and stored.
However, the advent of smart home devices coupled with recent events such as the exposé of Cambridge Analytica and the realisation that the data we share isn’t purely used for our benefit, means the question of data privacy is becoming more and more prominent. Instead, now the idea that personal data can be used to fuel the political agenda of the highest bidder is vastly accelerating a change in attitude and the desire for more transparency and control.
For a post-truth generation, the feeling is that they have been fooled yet again by the institutions that we have trusted. It remains to be seen whether conversation will continue to centre on Facebook alone, or whether audiences will begin to become fully aware of the vast swathes of data collected on them by other platforms and publishers too.
The timing of these revelations is crucial, landing just weeks before GDPR comes into force, ensuring that all data is collected and processed in a much more regulated way. GDPR requires brands, platforms and publishers to be more explicit about the way in which they will use audience’s data, and audiences have to actively opt in to sharing their personal information, marking a huge opportunity to start to change the conversation about use of personal data.
The way in which this is done is crucial, as there’s a significant difference between accepting T&Cs which legally show compliance to sharing data, and consciously realising what data we are sharing. The reality is, T&Cs are long and confusing to most consumers and won’t really address the problem of transparency around data.
Instead, now we have the opportunity to start lifting the fog about how we collect data and use it, and instead give our audiences honest and clear information about what we want from them and why. It is this that will be the biggest asset in staving off the threatened loss of trust from many marketers’ most valued audience — the smart, tech-savvy 20-something.
Holly Fischer, Senior Account Manager, Havas Media Manchester
