Building privacy-first organizations

Catlin Bowers: The right time to start building a culture of privacy: It’s now.

Deva Bronson: We’re at an exciting time right now, because we have the opportunity to go beyond some of the tools that we had before.

Second Assistant Camera: Take one.

Bowers: Hello.

Grant Keller: I see industry leaders turning to privacy by design as a strategy, and that really means that privacy has to infuse all departments in all functional areas inside the organization.

Bowers: We’re talking about privacy regulations, updates, partner-solution updates, how to have conversations with clients about privacy, because it’s a scary subject. Those teams can disseminate that information into their departments and just creating that culture of having privacy be top of mind.

Bronson: We also have the opportunity to start to build some of these goals into our everyday performance objectives to make sure that that’s captured at the end of the performance cycle.

Bowers: As industry moves away from third-party cookies and other types of identifiers, brands can really look to that first-party data and making sure that they have the correct permissions to use that in a way that still allows them to grow their business.

Clarissa Season: That will require clients to start thinking about their first-party data strategy in a way that they have never had to think about it before. They’re going to have to start collecting new and better pieces of information about consumers and also, obviously, growing that collection of data that they had to begin with.

Bronson: Be sure that you know where your data is coming from. We all know first-party data is the safest, the cleanest. If you’re using any other kind of data, just make sure that you are getting it from a trusted source that is compliant with local, federal, and global standards.

Season: I think it comes back to having a first-party data strategy. At the end of the day, we can’t just collect data willy-nilly. If you’re not taking that step back and thinking about that strategy, nothing else is going to work as a waterfall from that.

Bronson: Transparency is needed to build trust. One way that we’ve seen some of our clients build trust is to initiate a recontact strategy that reaches back out to folks that are already consumers to make sure that they understand what the terms of that relationship are.

Keller: They need to be gathering first-party data and connecting it in meaningful ways. They need to be investing in machine learning and AI skills, and understanding what these capabilities can bring. They need to be prepared to experiment while we still have cookies and can validate our results against hard metrics.