A Major Transformation In The Digital Marketing Ecosystem
A Major Transformation In The Digital Marketing Ecosystem
Adtech is riddled with fraud. It’s time that brands and publishers take control and rebuild trust in the digital advertising industry.
Trust is the foundation of every successful business organization, but you’d never know it by looking at the digital marketing industry. Customers are often told the internet is free, when in reality, they’ve been paying for it with their personal information. Their personal data is often collected (sometimes without their knowledge) and then utilized in the form of advertising.
It’s time for the industry to reverse this trend and create an ecosystem built on trust, transparency and choice.
In its current form, the digital marketing system is complex and opaque. There are thousands of companies collecting, buying and selling consumer data, making it a breeding ground for fraud. Brands and publishers have been made to believe there are no viable alternatives, and they continue to fund this system. And it all comes at the expense of users, whose data is tracked and transacted indiscriminately, without their consent.
This is essentially stealing, so no wonder this behavior is increasingly deemed illegal. A growing number of local, national and multinational governmental organizations have enacted privacy laws to prevent this kind of underhanded data collection.
Not only is this behavior unethical and illegal, but it’s also bad business. In fact, according to our company survey of more than 287,000 people, 52% of consumers agree that intrusive or irrelevant messages give them a poor opinion of the app or website hosting the messages — especially if data was unknowingly collected from them. That’s why it’s time to establish a different model — one that’s based on trust, transparency and user choice.
Before the internet, when business was mainly physical, consumers had more intimate and tangible relationships with the businesses they patronized. They could see the gleaming marble floors of their bank and interact face-to-face with their teller. They received in-person customer service when shopping for clothes. They could touch and feel the business they were buying from, and it engendered trust.
