The Changing Privacy Landscape

Insights to Help Advertisers Prepare
 

 

Transcript

David McBee:
Hello, and welcome to the Simpli.fi Webinar Series. I’m David McBee, Director of Training. Thanks for joining us on the second Monday of each month for industry news, interviews, product roll-outs, and training on all things related to targeted advertising and of course, connected TV. And if you miss us live, you can always visit the webinars page of our website at simply.fi/webinars or request access to our learning management platform for all of our previously recorded episodes and other valuable resources. It’s June of 2022, and I have invited Simpli.fi Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Paul Harrison, to talk about all things related to privacy, cookies, data fragmentation, and more. Paul, thank you so much for joining us.

Paul Harrison:
Yeah, thanks for having me.

David McBee:
It’s always a blast having you’re so intelligent and you bring the webinars to a new level when I have you on, so thank you for that.

Paul Harrison:
Thanks.

David McBee:
All right. Let’s just jump right into it. Okay. Let’s talk about privacy. It’s always a hot topic. So here’s a very open-ended question. What the heck is going on with privacy and what is Simpli.fi doing to ensure that we keep providing great audience targeting for our clients?

Paul Harrison:
So privacy is one of those topics that is ever popular among the legislators out there in all the various states. We’re even seeing it expand in the EU. And a lot of what happens in the EU seems to end up here in the US at some point. Right now we’re kind of facing a patchwork of privacy laws across the nation. So there are different things that we have to do to stay on top of our privacy statement, making sure that we’re managing data appropriately. Most of all, the privacy is around being able to allow folks to opt out and whatnot. The good news is that the way Simpli.fi, at least manages the data. It’s all anonymized, it’s encrypted in such a way that there’s no real way to pull that data out in such a way that would violate any of those privacy laws.

And so we’re constantly looking at what we can do to improve. We are participating in many different forums out there that are focused on privacy. I’m on the NEI board. And so we are focused on privacy. That is a topic of almost every meeting that we have. And we’re also staying abreast of all of the optout mechanisms. We get audited on the privacy. We test to make sure that our optout mechanisms work. And we feel like that we’re a leader in that space. So privacy is always top of mind, not only in process, but also in design of products.

David McBee:
Sounds like we’re all over it.

Paul Harrison:
Yeah, I think we are.

David McBee:
Okay. Well, let’s get into this, everyone wants to know about this cookieless future. And I’ve talked to you enough times to know that your stance is really… We don’t know anything until we know anything, but the articles I’ve read, big tech is saying that there’s going to be a fix for this cookie issue. There’s going to be some kind of universal solution adopted that’s going to work for everyone. What do you think about that?

Paul Harrison:
I don’t think there’ll be a universal solution. I think that sounds great. Makes for a good sound bite. But at the end of the day, I don’t think that the… At least the meetings that I sit on when we’re on these W3C meetings are going to provide any kind of universal mechanism. I think there will be competing mechanisms out there. I think the browsers are going to implement all of their various sandboxes and their idea of what privacy should look like. Which means that we’re going to see a fairly fragmented future. I think that with a fragmented future, you have to have the right kinds of tools in place in order to take all of the various signals out there and pull this together in order to still target in a cookieless future for us, we’ve never been huge fans of cookies. We had them around because they were just a cross check on some things, but they were never essential to the operation of what we were trying to do.

David McBee:
That’s one of the things I always get from you is like, anytime I bring up anything related to privacy and the news and the cookies, you just have this calm about you like it doesn’t worry you. How is that possible?

Paul Harrison:
Well, it doesn’t worry me because anybody who’s been in the ad tech space for any amount of time knows that change is constant. And those who stay on top of these topics and stay ahead of these waves, tend to be the winners in this space. You will see some losers in the space. We see some companies out there that are trying to focus on contextual targeting or other types of mechanisms for targeting, which is fine because we cut our teeth on contextual very early and we have a lot of tools that are available that compete very well in that particular arena. But in reality, I still think that targeting is going to be very much possible. I think that the data will just be more fragmented and I think attribution will also be very much possible. It’s just, it’s going to be a little bit different from browser to browser, and you’re going to have to find ways to kind of unify the data.

David McBee:
All right. So you’ve mentioned fragmentation a couple of times, dive more into that, is that happening? And is it causing headaches for us?

Paul Harrison:
Yeah, so I think that if you weren’t constantly innovating, yes, fragmentation could cause problems. What you have to be able to do is you have to be able to use methods for capturing the various types of data that are out there. You have to use different techniques. We use some machine learning to pull this data together into a graph of graphs that allows us to continue to target and pull this data back together for attribution purposes. Everything we do is compatible with all of the major legislation out there. It is something that we do audit, and we have a third party audit that looks at this. And as I said earlier, even when we start a project, we think about the privacy implications of what this data could be used for. So we’re very thought forward on this particular topic.

David McBee:
Is there any chance you could tell me a little bit more about the data graph? In layman’s terms, how did that work?

Paul Harrison:
Yeah, so the data graph at the base of the graph, we have our own graph that we’ve had since very early on in the company. And it became clear as we saw some of the change on the horizon that no one company can possibly see everything out there. And so everyone has a different view. Some of the companies out there see better data around CTV, some see better data around mobile, some see better data around display or social or whatever the area may be. And so that has created a bunch of graphs out there. And I’ve mentioned in one of these previous updates that there are at the time, I think there were 81 different signals or IDs that people could use in growing. And I think you’ll continue to see that.

And so what we have to do is we’ve built out tools that measure all of these different IDs. And so when we work with other graph providers and all the various IDs they have, we can measure what their effectiveness is, what their overlap is with our own graph and with the existing graphs we have in there to give us an idea of what the incremental reach will be for both targeting and attribution. And so that’s how we continue to evolve that graph in order to stay ahead of a lot of these changes. I’m hoping some of these “universal solutions” will simplify some of that just to borrow from our own name. But if anything, I feel like browsers tend to complicate things over time.

David McBee:
You mentioned CTV in that last answer. What’s the world of privacy look like in the CTV environment?

Paul Harrison:
Well, I think eventually, we’ll see a deprecation of IPS in the CTV space, which I think is one of the main signals that people use to target against and attribute against. There are several solutions out there, mostly around an ID that’s in a block graph that you can then use and target against. And many of the set top box companies and some other video providers are taking those IDs and making them available for that particular graph provider. There’s a couple of others popping up as well. So I think there will be replacement IDs in there. There are already replacement IDs for a good portion of the traffic, but as video continues to grow, CTV continues to grow. There’ll be more opportunity in that space.

David McBee:
I’m getting the sense from you that like every time something is taken away, something just comes along to replace it. It might be more complicated. It might be fragmented as you mentioned, but there’s always going to be a replacement for the things that the loss seems to be trying to protect users from. Would you agree?

Paul Harrison:
Yeah, I think so. And I think if you read up or listen in on some of the recorded sessions around this particular topic, really, they’re just trying to create a certain level of anonymity for people on browsers. It doesn’t have to be perfect anonymity. They’re trying to shoot for a certain percentage of anonymity so that you at least, can’t say for sure, if you have five or more pieces of data to identify a particular household or individual. And so the folks that are behind all of the privacy aspects of the browser just want some sort of level of protection there that still gives people a sense of security when they’re online.

David McBee:
So in Europe, I know they’re implementing some different approaches to dealing with privacy. Do you think that will impact the US?

Paul Harrison:
I think that the US on the privacy topic tends to look to Europe and adopt those. In some ways it’s nice because it creates some sort of unity. In other ways, it creates complications. Right now, at least at the federal level, they haven’t really introduced anything major yet. They may soon. I know there are a lot of discussions, but it’s hard to predict what’s going to happen there. And instead, what we have is, we have a pretty strong one in the EU, and then we have various state level. And in some instances, municipalities like larger cities we’ll have privacy requirements as well. So that’s a little more complex having to navigate. We do work through those. We do have dedicated people that work with legal teams, some of the leading legal minds on the privacy topic in this space in order to help us navigate that patchwork, I would like to see some federal legislation at some point, I’m not afraid of privacy. I think that’s a strength for us. And I think it’s a winning topic for us as well.

David McBee:
Nice to hear you say that. So let’s talk about attribution real quick. There’s a big push that attributions is going to be even harder in the future, and that panels are going to make a comeback. Do you believe that?

Paul Harrison:
I do think attribution will become harder. We’ve already seen it with some of the reduction of various signals in the fragmentation of data. We’re still able to attribute, but I do think that panels very well could become a part of it. It’s just they won’t be panels like they necessarily were in the past. I think even the notion of what defines a panels going to evolve. For instance, let’s say you’re collecting data at a stadium for a particular sporting event, right? Instead of having a fixed set of panelists, you may use the data that you are able to collect from there, which would be a fragment of the overall population of that particular sporting event and use that as your base panel. And so there’ll be different methods for scaling that data. And there’ll probably be some standardization around that, mostly around counts on towers or counts in area.

I doubt it’ll be population scaled. It’ll be more device scaled based on other signals. So I think that’s where we’re going to see some of the changes of how this works. Companies will probably still report the raw numbers, but they’ll also report the calculated numbers as well, to give you a better sense of things. I’m not thinking that we’re going to have the same type of panels where you have a hundred thousand people that have signed up that will give you information about themselves and let you track everything they do. And then you use that as your base data. I think we’re actually going to use real data as base data. That way it’s a lot more transparent on how you’re arriving at those numbers.

David McBee:
Yeah. And you’re not assuming that people are telling the truth or lying about their data as well.

Paul Harrison:
That’s correct. Yeah.

David McBee:
All right. So big picture. You’re talking to advertisers right now. Lots of advertisers listen to this webinar. A lot of them are very concerned about losing some of their targeting and their attribution. Hopefully by now they feel a little bit better about it, but what else do you want them to know?

Paul Harrison:
I think that advertisers should be working with companies that are focused on innovation and focused on privacy. There are a lot of companies in our space that are not NAI members. I personally am an advocate for working with companies that are NAI members. Obviously I believe in the NAI because I’m on the board. And I think that they are setting a tone for privacy data used in a responsible way, which leads to data being able to use an attribution. And I think that, that is really the future that they’re advocating for responsible use of that data. And we fall squarely into that category. There are some other great companies out there that I also feel that fit into that category. And I think that’s what advertisers should be focused on because they’re going to roll with the changes and they’re going to come out winners at the end of the day.

David McBee:
Awesome. All right. Anything else you want to leave our listeners with?

Paul Harrison:
I think that privacy’s a great topic. I think it’s something that we should continue to talk through. It’s something that we should continue to advocate for. Not so worried about the cookies, not so worried about the signals, those kinds of things solve themselves. It’s a big industry. There’s a lot of money involved and there’s a need for it. And anytime you have the convergence of those things, solutions are provided.

David McBee:
Awesome. Well, thank you very much for taking some time out to chat with me today and share all your wisdom with our attendees. I appreciate you.

Paul Harrison:
All right. Thanks.

David McBee:
Thank you all for joining us today. If you have questions about Simpli.fi offerings, please reach out to your Simpli.fi account manager, or if you’re new to Simpli.fi , you can email us at hi@simpli.fi. A copy of this webinar recording will be available along with a complete transcript in Simpli.fi learning management portal and on our website at Simpli.fi/webinars. You can go there at any time to see all of our archived webinars from the past, and there’s some good ones in there. So I hope you’ll check it out. In the future please join us on the second Monday of each month for the Simpli.fi Webinar Series. I’m David McBee, be awesome and we’ll see you next time.