A Tale of Two Perceptions - Brands vs. Consumers

Hi and good afternoon, everyone. I’m Marisa Kozlov, vice president at Insider Intelligence. Welcome to today’s Tech Talk webinar where we host guest speakers from all areas of media, ad tech and martech. It is a pleasure to welcome Ryan Fleisch today. Ryan is the head of product marketing, real-time CVP and audience manager at Adobe. Hey, Ryan, so nice to have you with us today. Thanks for having me on, Marisa. Today’s presentation is titled A Tale of Two Perceptions, Brand versus Consumers, Results of the Identity Evolution Study. Ryan will unpack the understanding and readiness level of the advertisers and publishers for a cookie-less future. Just a few housekeeping items to share with you before we get started. You will receive a link to view today’s recording and slides. And if you still have colleagues or friends that want to join us, have them go to our social channels to view the simulcast on either LinkedIn Live or Twitter. And finally, before we start, don’t forget to submit questions throughout today’s webinar. We will be hosting a live Q&A during the second half of the webinar where Ryan can answer any questions that you have. So please keep the questions coming. We will do our best to get to as many as we can and look forward to hearing from you. So without further ado, Ryan, take it away. All right. Thanks, Marisa. Thanks, everyone, for joining. So really excited to be here with you today as we just finished up two new studies around the cookie-less future and advertisers and marketers preparedness for that, as well as the consumers’ perception of the state of data and identity. So just to level set today, we’re going to be walking you through these two studies, the findings from them, and I hope that it’ll be really helpful in understanding what your peers are thinking and how consumers are viewing these changes. But in the coming weeks, Adobe will also be coming out with more of a stance on what our role in a cookie-less future is and more materials that are more tactical to help marketers through that. So stay tuned for that. But we will save that for the second date. So today we’re going to be walking through what is the high level change that’s on the horizon. And then we’ll look first at the consumer study that was done to understand their state of mind, the marketer state of mind, and we’ll pack all that up into a preparedness checklist that you can start running through with your organization. Like Marisa mentioned, we’ll leave some time for Q&A at the end. So go ahead and submit those questions throughout. OK, so there’s a curse slash blessing that says, may you live in interesting times, and that interesting times are never that peaceful. And I think as marketers and maybe we have some IT folks on the line, advertising folks, that’s certainly the case with working in our field. There are a lot of changes happening and they’re happening and over the next year to 18 months. And it means that there’s a lot that we have to reimagine around our businesses. I’m assuming most people on the line here are pretty familiar with these changes, so I’m not going to spend a ton of time here. But the ones that are getting talked about a lot are Apple going to be requiring consent for their ID for advertisers. Google said they’re going to be deprecating third party cookies over the next two years, which we’re now looking at about 12 to 18 months. And as we’ve seen, policies like CCPA and GDPR already go into effect. We’re expecting more crackdown on those from regulators to make sure that their compliance there. Now, while those are the headlines, it means a lot for our businesses and namely, it means that we’re having to think about as a brand, how do we shift to more durable identifiers that can weather this storm that aren’t going to impact all of our use cases when the third party cookie goes away? It means how are we still going to deliver the expectation of personalization that consumers have? A recent study found that 89% of consumers just expect personalization from the brands they deal with. If they don’t get that, they’re less likely to stick with them. So consumers are somewhat somewhat ruthless in this area that they’re not thinking about from our lens, how much work goes into still delivering this personalization. They’re just expecting it. And third, as we deal with these more durable identifiers and a lot of personally identify identifiable information, it means that privacy and governance have to come to the forefront of just about all of our practices. We need to make sure that there’s the right consent when we’re gathering data, the right governance, labeling and usage and enforcement on where that data is going out to. And finally, a trend that’s been happening for years in this space, but it’s just getting even further accelerated and data platforms is further consolidation. We’ve had data management platforms, customer data platforms. These are going to have to come together to give one complete view of our customer. When we think about the timeline for some of these changes, while there’s a lot happening, the two big loose dates to look out for are early this year, Apple has said that’s when they’re going to be requiring consent for IDFA’s and with them having a 25 percent global market share and 60 percent in North America, that’s certainly going to result in a drop in track to targeted users. And then debatably, the bigger cliff that will be coming will be an early to maybe now mid 2022, where Google has said we’re going to deprecate third party cookies. Now, we have this line slanting downwards on this graph because our hope is that through conversations like we’re having today and subsequent ones will help marketers start to wean off of the third party cookie leading up to that date so that it’s not a drastic point in time, but rather just a continuation of the preparedness you’ve already been putting in to your practices. All right. The other thing I’ll mention before we get into the study here is just the use cases that will be impacted. Now, there’s a lot of use cases and we actually asked advertisers and marketers about what they’re most worried about with cookies going away. But some of the big categories that came up were this cross property tracking and personalization. So if you’re a brand that has multiple sites, different sub brands, different brands broken out by region, that can result in a really difficult time in tracking these users across your different properties. And then for anybody who’s done programmatic advertising and acquisition that’s been based off of third party data, that’s also going to require a reimagination here to figure out how do I still get the scale and open up the top of the funnel to find new users to bring into the fold here. And third, something as simple as measurement of just getting the data we need back and forth from brands to publishers, especially when it comes to advertising. That’s going to be challenged as well. So when we think about the future and what the future is, what this requires, I alluded to this a second ago, but it can no longer be about disparate platforms working off of different types of ideas. Historically, we’ve seen that on the left side of this customer lifecycle spectrum, you’ve had data management platforms really responsible for awareness and conversion and those being primarily operating under pseudonymous data. And on the right, you’ve had CDPs that have focused on growth and loyalty of known users. But in a cookie-less world, we really believe that these have to come together under a single system and view of the customer or else there won’t be the upper funnel awareness you need or the continued experience that customers expect to receive after they’ve told you something about themselves or purchased from your brand. So let’s get into the study we did. We partnered with Adventus, who is a leading social research firm, and we ran two concurrent studies. The first was to over a thousand consumers and both of these were global. So we asked a thousand consumers things like how they’re using technology today, what their knowledge level is around data and policies. And then we asked brands, 400 of them, and individuals within those across marketing and IT and other capacities that are preparing for this cookie-less future, how are you thinking about this? What do you need to get there and still do over the next 12 to 18 months? And that’s what we’re going to walk through today. So on the consumer side, a little bit more about how we did this. I mentioned the technology usage, the data and identity knowledge. We also asked consumers, what’s your perception of what data you consider as personal? And what do you consider most personal? And in return, if you’re going to give that up to a brand or if they’re going to collect it, what’s fair? What’s fair around how they collected, around how they use it, and around how you’re given some type of value in return for that data? And then on the flip side, we asked brands, what’s your data and identity knowledge? How’s this going to impact your business? How ready are you today? And then what gaps and needs still exist that you’re looking to overcome in the upcoming months? So let’s start at a high level with the consumer here. I’m going to breeze through these first two stats because I don’t think they’re that surprising. The first is that, hey, we’re spending more time online than ever. I was a little overwhelmed by this number, though. 38% of consumers said they spend over five hours of internet usage time, and that’s outside of work and school. So that’s just personal time on top of that. If you bring that number down to three hours a day plus, that’s up to 75% of consumers. So we’re spending more time online. We’re giving up more data and information about ourselves than ever. We’re doing that across more devices. The average American now has access to over 10 connected devices in their household. But the piece I wanted to flag here that I think is a ladder from the first two is that as we’re getting more invested into technology and spending more time there, there is more of a consumer awakening happening around how is this data being collected and used? I think it’s natural questions that we’ve all asked as consumers, but if you just take a look around at documentaries that have come out on Netflix or films like The Social Dilemma, which was really popular a few months back, if you look at New York Times bestselling books around Cambridge Analytica, around Snowden’s book, these are things that are really bringing data and privacy to the forefront of our conversations. And so with that, we really wanted to understand how are consumers perceiving this today? How much do they know about the usage of data and what do they expect in return? The other thing to notice at a high level here, and again, not too surprising with this stat, but that four out of the six top sources that consumers use to either find new products or interact with their favorite products and brands are to varying degrees going to be impacted by this cookie-less future. That being streaming advertising on television, search, online banner ads and video ads. So we need to really think again from the consumer lens that while a lot’s changing on our side, they’re just expecting this personalization across these channels where they’ve already said they like getting their information interacting with your brands on. But now we get into where I think the study really started to pick up and get pretty interesting here. The first is around just the knowledge gap of consumer perception of how much they know versus how much they actually do know. And we asked questions at varying levels of detail here. We first just asked consumers, hey, do you understand how internet cookies work? And everyone thinks they do. 72% of consumers are like, absolutely, we understand how internet cookies work. But then when we ask any type of follow up question like, hey, did you know that there’s different types of internet cookies, first party versus third party, there was a big drop off in knowledge level there, which is probably to be expected. But it was pretty disparate between the confidence consumers are building around data and their expectations versus how much they actually understand the interoperability of these different identifiers. And we’ll get to that in a second around what that means for us as brands. But I think it’s really important to keep this disparity in mind between consumer perceptions of what they want versus how much they understand. We have to keep this simple. The second piece was similar set of questions around, hey, do you understand data policies that are out there now? From government, from technology, and again, most answered absolutely, we do. But then even just ask questions like, hey, are you familiar with the following terms? Well, some of those terms we asked were GDPR, CCPA, and IDFA. Terms that most of us on this call have probably lived and breathed for the last few years. But yet 63% of consumers said they were not at all even familiar with the terms, much less the nuances of those policies. But what was interesting is despite that knowledge gap around what consumers think they know versus how they actually understand it, they were very clear about a few things. The first was that when we asked what are your priorities for policymakers, personal data usage and new policies and protection around that was by far the number one issue. In fact, quite a large spread between that and the next topic like tech company regulation or policies of special interests. So consumers know what they want and they want better protection. They want an understanding and they want compensation of some sort for their data. These are some pull quotes that we grabbed from the area of the study where we just gave people a chance to type what they were thinking here and what they’d like to see. I’ll read through these quickly, but these are quotes from consumers that said they could specify where my data goes, they being brand, as in what it’s used for. Since companies use my data to earn money, sell services or products and sell the data, pay me for the use of that data. Make it clear that data used will be paid for before asking for it on a site. What’s the amount of data being used and how is it being used? Possibly a breakdown of how much data goes in to the data or goes for in the data world. Now, I thought that in the previous quote were interesting because it shows that consumers might not have an understanding of, hey, what’s the value of my data or how is it transacted? What’s the price on it? But they are waking up to the fact of, yeah, companies are making a lot of money off of this. What am I getting in return? And the final two quotes more around just clarity here. Companies should be explicit upfront about their user data policies and this should also be the law. Explain exactly what they’re using my data for and also why they’re collecting my data. So some pretty strong and apparent themes that came through when we asked consumers for feedback here. Now, one of the thing I want to note is when we talked about the beginning, this deprecation of third party cookies on Chrome, there was an interesting trend that rose when we broke down the data around when we asked people what browsers they use and then how familiar they were with different cookie knowledge and collection strategies. And what was apparent is that Chrome users are by far the savviest. So I wanted to just quickly throw this statin slide in here to say that while we’ve already been through the song and dance before with Safari and others that have limited or prevented the use from third party cookies, Chrome users are definitely the most savvy here and are going to be most attuned to the changes that are happening. But now getting into when we ask consumers around what type of data do you consider personal, there were some really interesting findings here. The first is that when we said, what do you consider personal, as you would expect at the top of that was email address, first and last name, location information, all these types of PII. And cookie data actually fell pretty low on the spectrum. But when we asked us a different way around what would you expect to get from personal information and sharing that data, consumers were definitely still expecting something in return for their cookie data. So again, I think it highlights a little bit around consumers may not have a rock solid understanding of what’s personal data, what’s cookie data, what’s the difference between PII or pseudonymous. They just understand we’re giving something away. What do we get in return? So what are they willing to share that anonymous browsing data for is the way we framed this question. Well, 55% said no ads. If you can give me an ad free experience, you can happily have my anonymous data here. They also on the right said, if you can offer me free services, that’s really desired as well. But what was pleasantly surprising, both as a technologist and as the marketers and IT folks we have on the line, is that one of the top responses here was that consumers felt that a more personalized experience was something fair to receive in exchange for giving up their anonymous browsing data. And I think this is such an important point, right? That depending on the type of company you are on the line here, you might not have the ability to offer a no ads model or free services in exchange for this data. But all of us should have the ability to say we can give you a more personalized experience. And if we think back a second ago to customers saying, hey, I want to understand what my data is being used for. And if they say, hey, you can have this data if you give me more personalized experiences, it begs the thought that we should just be upfront with even if that’s what we’re offering for consumers without monetary compensation or free services. That’s actually something that they’ll welcome and understand in the majority of cases. Now we asked this question in a slightly different way. We said, what would you be willing to share your personal data for? And I think some of us might get a little bit of a chuckle out of this as marketers, because we noticed that we kind of labeled a similar type of identifier several different ways here just to understand consumer perception around how they felt, how personal it was, depending on how it was worded. What you’ll notice is browsing preferences where this was the second ranked type of information that they viewed most valuable and wanting something in return for. But in many cases, synonymous with that is cookie data, which fell actually further down on most of these lists and then hashed identifiers, which in certain cases can also be synonymous with it at the very end. So when we talked and framed it as personal data, even if it was still just cookies, this is where consumers expected either some type of cash offer in the form of a discount coupon or again, no ads or personalized experiences still ranked fairly high here. So boiling this down to consumer desires and expectations, calling it the four C’s here, we asked, you know, hey, what could be increased around transparency and personal data usage? What about when visiting digital properties? What expectations do you have? Without reading off all of these, it came down to four pretty apparent things consumers wanted. They wanted clarity of how their data was going to be collected and used. They wanted choice so that they could opt out of that or change their settings. And it was easy to find that they wanted to be asked for their consent before data was collected. And they wanted to make sure that however their data was then going to be used or sold was compliant with any policies that are in place. So we’ll come back to these four C’s later, but I think this is helpful to at least frame our understanding of how our consumers thinking about their data now before we start getting in to our strategies. But let’s move to that piece now. So the brand study we did again, we asked about knowledge, impact, readiness, gaps. Here’s where all that shook out. Marketers knowledge, as you would hope and expect, was much higher than that of consumers here. That being said, I’d still want to challenge all of us to expand our knowledge set over the next year. If we are advertisers, we might have been used to working only with cookies and non-PII. Well, we’re going to have to start getting more familiar with durable IDs, with PII, with other systems like CDT, and other things like that. And with only 50% of professionals saying they’re very familiar with many of these terms, I think there’s still room for all of us to grow and that we should make a priority in our organizations to ensure we don’t get caught on our heels as all these tectonic plates start to shift. Now, marketers, the other thing I would encourage all of us to is to mind the gap, right? I gave you a peek into the consumer mindset, but here’s what marketers responded. They said 71% of marketers said that they are currently giving consumer options and details around data collection. They said they’re already meeting with their privacy teams on a weekly basis. And they were possibly overly confident here that consumers understand their policies. Now, 85% is a really high number here. And let me just direct your attention back to some of the studies we just looked at on the consumer side. Less than half of customers said that they truly understand data policies when they read them. And only about 60% said they read them. So that creates a pretty large drop off in consumers actually understanding these, which is a big disparity for marketers here. So it’s important to keep that in mind that while we might think, hey, we’ve already checked the box on giving consumers details and options here, many consumers still aren’t feeling that way or it’s not apparent or front and center to them enough where they really understand it. All right, the big one here, deprecation of third party cookies like we talked about. If you are worried about this, if you’re feeling like you’re behind, I hope this slide gives you a little reassurance that you are in good company here. That if the cookie-less future were to take place today, only 37% of professionals said that they’re actually ready for it now. There’s a lot of work to be done over the next year or so. So let me start with that step, but then let’s dive into some of the other use cases, some of the other worries and some of the other needs here. Aside from deprecation of third party cookies, things that marketers and brands said they’re worried about is new consumer privacy laws that potentially could go into place that they’d have to react to. Constant consolidation of technology, what does this mean for implementing new technology, training teams on it, redoing our structure. Lack of human resources, so again, the people behind these technologies and these practices and these teams to actually make sure that we’re threading the needle around what a cookie-less future looks like and how we’re operating against it. And then we talked about IDFA’s as well, required consent there. So within these challenges, we asked brands, when are you going to be ready to overcome them? And this is where I hope everyone’s ears kind of perk up a little bit and realize that there’s a really strong opportunity if you can get ahead of these trends and in turn ahead of your competitors. The numbers played out where when we asked, hey, when are you going to be ready with your use cases and technology and all that to combat a cookie-less future? 59% said, yeah, we’ll be ready in 12 months or less. And that’s a decent number. But 41% said it is going to take us two years or more to really get a handle on this. And again, as brands that are listening in here, like this is your opportunity if you can start today and over the next year, really get a good foundation in place and practices in place for a cookie-less future. By default, you’re ahead of about 41% of your competitive set. And you can see how the numbers play out here that they trail off a little bit with some of these other worries and challenges, but there’s still an opportunity with each of them to make sure you’re getting ahead. So impacted use cases and performance. I don’t think I need to read through all these because just about everything was captured when we asked marketers to stack rank this right from personalization to audience expansion to finding new users to suppressing existing users. All of this is going to be impacted and the metrics behind those from efficiency to volume to reach. But to boil all that down to one really important number, we just asked how much of all of your different experience personalization efforts are currently dependent on the third party cookie and the response was 60%. That is a massive number of a lot that needs to be reimagined from everything you see on the screen across these use cases. So once again, I know it’s a daunting task, but a really strong opportunity to get ahead of the competition here. The other thing we asked about since there’s a lot of noise in market around this is, hey, when you look at one of these potential solutions listed here on the screen, how confident are you that it’s going to solve essentially all of your needs? And we purposely asked this question expecting these results because I think it highlights a really important point that there is not going to be a silver bullet in the future where we can say, yeah, we’re just going to turn all of our advertising to contextual and we’ll be good. Or yeah, as long as we just have a first party data co-op, we’ll be fine. Now, all of these are important and Adobe is committed to exploring and supporting flavors of each of these for our clients as are many in the industry. But if someone or a provider or a technology partner is going all in on one of these, that’s when our ears should perk up and we should get a little bit of caution. Because it’s going to take, depending on the use cases we just saw that are all dependent on third party cookies, a pretty expansive solution or set of solutions that incorporate these and others to really still deliver that connected experience for our customers. So we asked brands, what do you still need to do? What’s the action on your side that hasn’t taken yet, but you’re planning to do to prepare here? Well, the first is most people still need to implement some new technology. They’re not quite there yet with their tech stack and they’re exploring systems like CDPs and and other similar solutions to figure out how do I have a durable foundation centralized customer record that can live into a cookieless future. They also flagged in here things like the internal education and awareness that we talked about. So building a center of excellence is going to be really important around how are we thinking about customer data and how is it being used across our different teams going forward. We also asked, hey, what can your martech vendors be doing to better support you? Well, better integrations was the number one, and this kind of builds off the back of what I just said a second ago, right? Moving to a cookieless future is not a day in time. It’s not a point in time. It’s not a single implementation. It’s going to be a journey. And you need to pick the partners that can grow with you where maybe you’re just looking for one type of technology to get started with on a crawl walk one approach. That’s fine. But can that vendor grow with you and provide better integrations as your use cases grow? The other things that brands said is they want more transparency from their vendors on how a cookieless future is going to be tackled. They want more resources devoted to it. They want clear POVs and they want built in governance tools to make sure they’re handling labeling and using the data in the right way. Need for speed. This was the highest response we got of any question. We asked having a central customer record that’s updated in real time. What would you say about that? 94% said it is very important to them. But then there was a big disparity between having that today. Only 40% said, yeah, we do currently have a centralized customer record that’s updated in real time. And then of that subset, only 37% said that that real time profile is then shared in real time with other marketing systems that have access to it. So 37% of 40% is a big drastic change from the 94% of professionals that said this should be a very important priority over the next 12 months. So if you haven’t already, start thinking about this, start exploring ways to overcome this and to build a centralized customer record and make sure that it’s a record that’s accessible. When we removed the real time component to this and said, just, hey, do you have a centralized profile that’s used throughout all of your marketing systems? Only 24% said yes. And I think it got a little bit more concerning when we then dug into what types of marketing systems are those that have access. Because the top responses, analytics, CRM, that all makes sense. But when you get down to how are we actually going to activate or acquire new customers, all of those types of systems, CDP and display media, ad sales, DMPs, agency partners, we’re all sub 30%. So again, giant white space if you can get your house in order over the next 12 months to say I have a system built, I have a centralized customer record, and I have it shared with an ecosystem of other technologies here. If you can get those things in place, then you’ll be prepared for a cookie list future. And here’s a checklist of some other items to be thinking about. So one is get started today. Like I said, you know, it’s a little bit of a moving target on some of these dates, but 12 to 18 months is not a lot of time. By the time you vet technology, get it implemented, get it integrated with other systems, don’t delay on this. We have some really good insight that we’ve gathered on the consumer mindset. So respect the four C’s here. The clarity that they want about their data, the choice of how they can opt in or opt out, the consent of when you ask them and the compliance of how it’s used. Focus on your first party data strategies. Start building those today, collecting first party data, making sure that it’s extensible to other platforms and you can get the most out of it. And embrace the age of the CIO and CMO. So one data point I should have overlaid a few slides back is when you talk about that centralized customer record and it being integrated with other systems, over half of respondents said that that process was managed by the CIO org. So it’s time to become best friends between these two orgs, right? This is an age where we’re going to have to have a centralized customer record being built and managed oftentimes in the CIO side and then used by the CMO org and other teams so that it’s a consistent experience. Begin building a scalable foundation with your vendors. This is really important. Like I said, you know, going in with a point solution that might solve or check the box on one of your needs today, but doesn’t allow you to grow with them is going to get you into trouble down the road. And don’t go all in on one strategy. If there’s, you know, vendor knocking on your door that’s going all in on contextual advertising or just a first party co-op, right? It’s time to think bigger than that. Think how do all of these fit together and how do I have a flexible foundation to ladder these on as I need. The real time customer profile and the integrations to that, as you just saw, is a huge area of opportunity if you can get your house in order there ahead of your competition. And then I mentioned a few times the people behind all of this technology and these practices, it’s going to be really important to evolve your audience center of excellence or build one for the first time so that they’re a liaison between these different teams. And, you know, again, helping move from what might have been a different idea used in an advertising team versus a loyalty team versus an in store team. It’s time to bring all of that together. So beyond just the tactics of this checklist, I just quickly want to revisit those four things we talked about and we looked at the headlines at the beginning of this. The shift to durable identifiers is happening. Make sure you’re building a foundation off of that. Bear in mind that consumers are just expecting personalization and we need to keep up with their demands if we want to keep them happy. That privacy and governance can’t be an afterthought anymore. There’s going to be a lot of teams needing to handle sensitive data. So ensuring that you have collection and labeling and usage and enforcement around that is going to be ever more important. And again, think about how these platforms are coming together rather than thinking about silos of different solutions accomplishing different needs. So I know we covered a lot of data and stats there and I just want to reiterate what I said at the beginning that the goal of today’s call was get you thinking about, hey, where’s the mindset of your peers? Where’s the mindset of consumers? And what are some things to start thinking about? But in the coming weeks, we’ll be coming out with a lot more white papers, collateral and sessions that will actually be getting into what are the actual tactics, technology and the specifics you need to accomplish these pillars you see on the screen. I hope this was helpful today. And Marissa, I will turn it back over to you here. Thank you, Ryan. I think you definitely achieved that goal. That presentation was fascinating. You know, it’s so interesting. At the very beginning, you said as marketers, we’ve been talking this talk for years now with GDPR, with CCPA, IDFA. But then again, as your studies showed, there are a significant amount of consumers that think they know where their data is visible. But then again, once they understand it a little bit more, may not fully understand what’s happening. But also then to see how your studies showed the ways in which consumers would potentially be incentivized to share more of their personal information. Extremely interesting. Thank you so much for being with us today. And let’s get right to that Q&A because we have a number of questions from our audience that I’d like you to answer. The first comes from Matt in San Diego. Matt asks, how will this impact access to third party data for profile enrichment? Yeah, so like we talked about third party data is going to be a big drop off when it comes to third party cookie based data, which is, I’d say the majority of it right now, especially in the advertising world. Now, there still could be a place for third party data if it’s collected in a way that again, has consent and clarity to the consumer, you know, and then used by a third party. But that is definitely going to be a more limited data set than just saying, oh, I can buy, you know, massive scale third party cookie pools today. So my recommendation there would be start building that first party data set, but then be thinking about do I have an extensible ecosystem that I can use it in or branch off from it? Great. Well, thank you. And Matt, I hope that was helpful to you also. Great recommendation. Gerard in New Orleans asks, what should brands do if they don’t focus on or collect durable identifiers and people based data? That’s a perfect bridge from the first question in that if you can start building a first party data foundation, that’s the starting point of a seed audience. Right. And to your question, if you if you’re a brand that doesn’t have a lot of durable identifiers, you’re not collecting a ton of PII, that’s okay, as long as you have an ecosystem where you can use what you do have on hand. And what I mean by that is even if you have just somewhat of a small seed audience of first party data, you have an ecosystem of second party partnerships that you can share that with and say, hey, this is what my best consumer looks like. Help me find more users like that on your publishers properties, for instance. That’s a great way where you can then still accomplish acquisition and awareness and reach. But it’s just kind of a shift in how that lookalike modeling is taking place. Right. It’s having an ecosystem and technology set up where you can pair that off a durable ID with different publishers and still get scale off of it. Okay. Ryan, Monique in New York City says that she works for a media agency. How do you think this will impact her business? Well, I think it’s it’s a trend we’ve already been seeing for a number of years around media agencies where they’ve been looking to how do I expand just beyond media? Right. Especially when covid hit. Obviously ad spend went down and we saw a lot of our great agency partners start looking at how do I get more entrenched with my client of helping them with their analytics. Data with activating analytics data and advertising use cases with feeding that advertising data, not media data back into audience and analytic systems. So I would say that while there’s definitely impact to how media has been transacted today, I think this really is just an accelerant of a trend we’ve already been seeing that for media. For media, you can start to use different types of systems, identifiers and audiences and really actually build stronger partnerships with your clients so that you are already, of course, an integral part to their business, but even more so with other lines of business and other solutions within their technology stack. OK, the next is a clarifying question that comes from Jenna in Montclair, New Jersey. She wants to know if you can expand upon what you meant during the presentations today by built in governance tools. Yeah. So I was speaking to that from from a few angles, because, like I said, privacy and governance is going to have to come to the forefront of a lot of our practices here. I’ll tell you about the way Adobe’s approach to this is we have a patented approach called dual, which is data usage, labeling and enforcement. And, you know, would encourage you to to explore that and make sure that you have these capabilities because it essentially looks at how is data being collected and where is it coming from? And then it can apply labels to that type of data, along with enforcement and restrictions around where that data can or cannot be used. And the reason that’s so important is you don’t want to leave that to chance or guessing across many different people within an organization. You want to understand if this is a piece of PII that I’ve collected or a data collected in a certain manner of consent, can I go use this in my ad system, for instance? And so by having a system in place to take out that trial and error and actually make sure that data is enforced and used correctly should be at the top of our list in terms of priorities. All right, Jenna, hopefully that helps with your question. We are going to take one more question today before we close. That comes from Andy in Rochester, New York. Andy asks, which technologies can help with future proofing our investments? I would say there’s a lot you could grow into over time. Like I said, you know, picking a vendor or solution that’s going to check the box on one area of a hookyless future is not set up for scale. So when we think about you mentioned a future proof solution or foundation there, first be thinking about that centralized customer record and the accessibility to it. So I would look at the customer data platform space as being key to that. If I can build a profile that’s a complete look at my customer of different durable identifiers, and then I have all the sources I need to build that profile and the destinations I need to activate it elsewhere. That’s what’s really going to set you up for then other pillars that can come out of that foundation of how you want to use data and what you’re really trying to accomplish across personalization, reaching known users or going to find new users that might look like a seed audience. Ryan, this has been great today. Thank you so much for being with us, especially for answering all the great questions from the audience and also for such an insightful presentation. We are very fortunate to have you here today. So before we wrap up. Yeah, absolutely. Before we wrap up, let me take a moment to share with our audience a little bit more about what’s happening across eMarketer’s media channels. You can register for upcoming live analyst and tech talk webinars at eMarketer.com slash webinars. On the audio side, don’t forget to tune into our daily podcast called Behind the Numbers. And of course, please subscribe to our various newsletters. Keep an eye on your email for the link to today’s recording and slides and of course, share those with your colleagues. And lastly, I do want to mention that for the next hundred days, we will be encouraging everyone to wear a mask. So be safe, wear a mask and please take care of each other. Thank you all for your time today. And thanks again to Ryan and the entire team at Adobe. We’ll see you for the next Tech Talk.