Brands' personalisation plans face privacy, trust hurdles: Ogilvy

The drive for personalisation at scale has led to a crisis of conflicting expectations, according to a new report from Ogilvy, as people are increasingly unwilling to share their data with brands due to privacy concerns and a lack of trust in digital advertisers. 

Brands' personalisation thrusts are also likely to be parried by increasingly stringent privacy regulations that restrict how marketers can aggregate customer data, according to Ogilvy's report, Driving Value at Scale with Human-centered Personalization. In Asia Pacific, a recent Microsoft survey found that fewer than one-third (31%) of consumers believe that their personal data will be treated in a trustworthy manner by organisations offering digital services.  

To overcome the odds, brands need to define the objectives of personalisation and how success will be measured, the report states. There must be a connection between data collection and return on investment, not just for brands but for customers too. Human-centred personalisation strategies that put the user’s wants and needs first, are imperative. Before even starting this process, Suresh Chivukula, partner at Ogilvy Consulting Asia, says brands need to align their promise with customers' expectations.

Even as data regulations get more strict, the Ogilvy report contends, brands have many ways to earn consent. They often make the mistake of taking the obvious route of discounts and promotions, and fail to explore non-monetary value exchanges. For premium brands, memberships or exclusive experiences may be more relevant. In fact, the report notes, it is likely brand marketers are already getting consent to gather data from customers—to a greater extent than the marketers may realise. The challenge is that different departments might be keeping information in silos, or data is collected on a campaign basis and then discarded. 

Even as they consider how to plot their personalisation plans, brand marketers also need to be conscious of the changing contours of first-, second- and third-party data, according to the report. With advances in technology, first-party data can be more nuanced and relevant to specific brand relationships and lead to better insights. Second-party data provides more scale via access to another company’s customer ID database, and the report advises selecting partners such as ticket sales platforms or other digital service providers that have wide reach. Finally, this also means the value of third-party data for building personalised marketing strategies is degrading fast. The quality of data and the targeting being done with it is questionable, the report concludes.