Finally, Honesty & Transparency in Digital Marketing Analytics

I saw a truly shocking commercial the other day. It’s IBM’snew commercial for Whirlpool. Specifically, it was an ad for Whirlpool’s new line of dishwashing machines.

I know, that doesn’t sound like shocking content. But in the commercial, IBM puts front-and-center the fact that they included a ton of digital monitors in their new dishwashing machines. These digital monitors, they say, will track everything about how you use them. A common household appliance is now a 200-pound tracking device only feet from your bedroom.

The commercial goes on to say how IBM is committed to collecting all of the data possible from users to continually improve the products they provide – or as they say, “Harnessing data to make great products better”.

That sounds fine. And they made it clear that the data they collect is about use – there are no hidden cameras and no microphones tapping your conversations.

So why does this sound innovative and acceptable to have in your home? Because IBM is being upfront. Facebook, whatever GPS system you use, your internet browsers – they all do the same exact thing. But the major difference here is that they aren’t upfront about it. They bury data collection and privacy policy details in their lengthy legal agreements that they know nobody ever reads.

And this is where IBM is ahead of everyone else in the game right now. Rapid innovation requires the detailed collection of pertinent data. But when companies don’t disclose the nature of the data they’re collecting, the imagination runs wild. IBM got ahead of that knee-jerk reaction with the novel marketing strategy of honesty. And that’s a strategy everyone should replicate.

How Digital Marketing is Impacting Our Eating – and Spending – Habits

Would you like to add cheesy bread for only $4.99?

Of course you would. Just tap “Yes” and you get cheese-covered bread. And that $4.99 isn’t real until you see it included in the order total, anyway. And that’s the last screen in the ordering process – you’ve gone to far to turn back now.

An article from the Economic Times came out discussing the strategy that major food delivery brands have of pushing add-on, lower-cost items in pop-ups between stages and pages of the food ordering process. It’s ubiquitous, and it’s also highly effective.

As Domino’s spokesman Tim McIntyre says: “…[the customers] tend to upsell themselves”. Domino’s didn’t share the exact numbers publicly, but they said that customers tend to spend more online than they do when they order in-store or over the phone. So Domino’s made an old-fashioned yet elegant move to push more people to order online: A direct mailing campaign of coupons, half or more of which are only redeemable online. Direct mailing print coupons is the best way to reach the non-digital customers, and making special deals available only online is a great way to nudge them to order online – potentially getting them to spend more.

But this isn’t limited to delivery-prominent restaurants. Restaurants like Chili’s and Olive Garden, among others, have started putting tablets at every table for customers to use to order. This has led to a similar increase in orders of appetizers and desserts – two product categories that are normally afterthoughts.

The takeaway? When you see everything you want in beautiful HD only a button touch away, the real-life value of the money those items cost is even more obscured by immediate satisfaction.

Data Transparency: An Problem Older Than Facebook

With big data collection emerging on the global stage as one of the most polarizing modern trends, a lot of people seem to be looking at the potential benefits and negatives myopically.

Data goes beyond what you see and share on Facebook or what you type into a search bar. Data is collected everywhere, for a limitless variety of purposes. Take Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) as an example. They’re a nonprofit that takes international charitable programs and rigorously evaluates them through randomized controlled trials (RCTs) – the same method used in medical trials.

Building a Better World With Data

IPA is the global leader in the niche nonprofit sector of gathering data on programs and influencing policy accordingly. But they hit an unexpected snag – other data-gathering nonprofits and academic institutions.

In order to establish external validity for a study’s outcome, this study has to be replicated in different conditions. The good news? A lot of these studies have been done before, in other countries with other populations, satisfying the requirement of external validity. The bad news? This data is not available.

There is no universal repository for data like this. In fact, it’s common practice to withhold your data from other researchers. The reason is simple: academics who got an academic paper published don’t want other academics taking their data, scrutinizing it, and contesting their outcomes.

A Solution in Data Transparency

One of the main issues that contributes to people not trusting data collecting is a total lack of transparency in what companies are collecting, how they’re using this data, and most importantly, who they share that data with. But we can’t blame companies entirely. This culture of not sharing data and treating it as private has been around way before the internet. Potentially life-saving datasets have been locked away in ivory towers for decades.

And that’s what has become normalized. Take Steve Ballmer’s new project USAfacts.org – it’s a site that shows where our tax dollars go to. It’s one of those ideas that’s so simple, once you start perusing it you’re flabbergasted that it never existed before. Taxes have been collected from the American people since before they were American, in the 1760’s. And now a website that shows us where our money has been going, started in 2017, is revolutionary? There’s something wrong there.

We Need a Change in Our Culture

So when people pay taxes every year for nearing three centuries without knowing dollar-for-dollar where the money is going, you can understand why we flip out when Facebook knows when we’re happy or not, or when Google knows we’re late for work and the best route to take. We’ve become used to being in the dark, and the light can be scary.

When you take international economic development and the revenue stream that provides the bulwark for our nation’s stability, digital ad targeting is a pretty small issue. But our fear is understandable. And so is these companies’ reluctance to share their data. This is the main obstacle to letting big data do what it should be doing in marketing, development, taxation, everything.

Desensitize Us – We’re Asking For It.

One of the current buzzwords around digital marketing and products is “democratization”. I find that’s hard to defend when the same companies that are democratizing the investing process, say, are also collecting data about us that they keep hidden from us. The publics sometimes seemingly irrational distrust of data collection is entirely rational. We don’t know what they’re doing with it.

If Facebook wants to collect data that will enable marketers to target emotionally vulnerable youths, then they should tell us, and also let us know that the ways in which this data is leveraged will be closely monitored by X, Y, and Z methods. I guarantee the public will be far more amenable to it.

We all know that countless amounts of data are being collected about our online and offline activities. So, to the major tech companies out there, don’t act like we don’t know. That’s why we don’t trust you. And we’re not wrong.

Which Data Points to Look at When Deciding if you Need a CDN

Buying a content delivery network (CDN) for your website can be a daunting chore. Do we understand advanced networking systems simply because we know how to operate a blog? No, no we don’t. But there are some telltale signs that can help you in your decision making process.

Page Load Speed

First and foremost, check your average page load speeds in Google Analytics. A CDN will provide with a network of servers that work together to collect and distribute your content. This helps with caching issues that can result in latency troubles.

The rule of thumb is 3 seconds – the average user will abandon a webpage if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. And this timeframe can minimize even more on mobile. If your speed is higher than 3 for either device, that’s a sign that you may want to invest in a CDN.

Speed and Geography

Another page load speed indicator is by location. Look at your page load speed by geographic location. If you get a large number of users in the U.K., and your speeds are slower for that area, that’s a sign. But don’t ignore traffic with high bounce rates – if you get a lot of unproductive, non-converting sessions from other countries, it could very well be because of latency issues. Getting a CDN could help you break into those geographic markets.

Do You Have SSL?

Google announced, in a rare moment of transparency, that SSL authentication on websites is definitely a ranking factor in SEO. It doesn’t matter if you run a simple blog with no email collection or product selling services – if you don’t have that little green lock in the upper left corner of your Chrome browser and your competitor does, you’re losing right off the bat.

Most CDN services come with SSL certification included, so you can put your customers’ minds at ease.

For your basic blog or website, CloudFlare offers a great, affordable option (and even a free option). It might be worth considering taking your online presence to the next level to make your content accessible quickly, across devices, and on a global level.

Facebook Gets Backlash for Segmenting Audience of “Emotionally Vulnerable” Youths

Today it was revealed that Facebook has been identifying “emotionally vulnerable” youths on their platform, segmenting them into an audience, and allowing advertisers to target this audience with their content. The backlash was immediate.

A spokesman for Facebook responded with this statement: "Facebook does not offer tools to target people based on their emotional state. The analysis done by an Australian researcher was intended to help marketers understand how people express themselves on Facebook.”

But regardless, this data was mined for children as young as 14, which is the legal cut off for a minor in Australia (where this report originated), and marketing research of minors is prohibited.

This obviously ruffled some feathers In Australia and here in America. And although it’s claimed that this data was not used to target young audiences with actual ads, it raises a lot of the questions surrounding data-driven ad targeting. This is obviously a particularly sensitive area to gather data without permission – but what would the negative be, exactly?

Hypothetically, let’s say a 14 year old is suffering from a bout of depression, and makes a post with keywords that trigger this acknowledgement in Facebook. An ad starts popping up in their feed, promoting one of those new apps that connects you with a licensed therapist. The kid uses the app, and gets better. Who exactly is the bad guy here?

Beyond targeting ads, gathering this variety of data can have infinite uses. Gathering this data could also help therapists put the known symptoms of depression into a cultural context – how it relates to trends and, more importantly, how these symptoms relate to, and reveal themselves in, social media platforms. This has a lot of potential for preventative mental health care.

It’s understandable to not want a soulless entity like Facebook or Google to know when you’re depressed. But that’s a knee-jerk reaction to having our vulnerabilities exposed. If we remove the stigma of depression and other mental health issues, there’s little reason left to willfully ignore the next frontier in preventative, contextualized and personalized mental healthcare.