Data changes that affect digital marketers

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Chances are, digital marketers reading any industry news in the last couple of months, are aware that data privacy is getting tighter – here in Virginia and around the world.

On the heels of a recent AMA Richmond conversation, we wanted to share a couple of data privacy and marketing-related items that have us shaking in our cleats.

Virginia adds data privacy law

Surely GDPR is something you’ve heard about, and you’re probably popping aspirin daily for the headache it causes if your organization has a European footprint. Well, imagine that GDPR just had a baby with California’s consumer data protection legislation. Behold! Virginia’s Data Consumer Protection Act. Ashley Brooks at Schroder Brooks Law Firm wrote a great article about the Virginia Data Consumer Protection Act. Virginia is the second state to enact sweeping digital privacy legislation, and it could affect how your organization markets itself to consumers.

Facebook vs. Apple

It’s the Battle Royale that we probably should have seen coming. The gist? Apple is updating its iOS to allow users to opt-in/out of data collection. Facebook says this will hurt small businesses (but let’s be real, it also hurts its bottom line since it clearly opens the door to a loss of advertisers). Organic reach on social is already dead, and if more people opt-out of data collection, what does this mean for us? We liked the breakdown and simple explanation offered by this marketing firm out of Colorado.

But we like cookies!

Google announced that it was nixing third-party cookies. From this handy article on Vox, “Google will stop…selling web ads targeted to individual users’ browsing habits, and its Chrome browser will no longer allow cookies that collect that data.” The article goes on to talk about how Google will move away from hyper-individualized target and move towards cohort targeting. That said, Google Search and YouTube do NOT fall under the cookie ban, since this is first-party data in Google Land.

So what does all of this mean?

We’re looking at more and more ways we can start collecting first-party data, so when some of these stricter data collecting rules come into effect, we’ll be prepared with information that consumers provided themselves. I see a lot more direct mail and email campaigns in the future…

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Casey Prentice

A self-proclaimed organizational junkie and data geek who confesses to a secret desire to be a professional organizer, Casey enjoys account management, writing, editing and digital content strategy. Her agency work has helped clients like Virginia’s Community Colleges, VCUarts and Swedish Match.

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