Can Artificial Intelligence Use Data to Solve the Consent Problem?
Martech Outlook | Thursday, November 24, 2022
The introduction of GDPR provided much-needed clarity on how data consent should be obtained and greatly increased public awareness of data protection problems.
FREMONT, CA: Due to recent nebulous attempts to map and control them using their data, many individuals are worried about who has access to their online data. The implementation of GDPR has raised public awareness of data privacy issues while providing much-needed clarity on how data consent should be collected. As a result, when that nasty box appears on the screen, we are well-trained to un-tick the appropriate boxes.
Platform owners have reacted quickly to a change in public opinion around data sovereignty and the threat of user apathy. Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) was the first to implement adjustments. Subsequently, other companies have done the same, with Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL) promising to phase out cookies by 2024.
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Digital advertising and, well, everyone who runs a website is concerned about this. Unhappy advertisers hurt the bottom line of big tech. Login-based services like Facebook (NASDAQ: META) and Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) profit from users' prior consent. However, they have still encountered messy cookie warnings. Due to Apple's new data privacy policies, Meta forecasted a USD 10 billion decline in ad revenue this year.
In the face of an increasingly consent-averse public, companies are racing to find ways to keep the money in advertising flowing and the data economy expanding. To better focus their advertisements, auction-based ad systems like Google have long used AI to forecast consumer behaviour. The data privacy revolution, however, has changed the rules of the game.
Google's Topics API and Google Analytics 4 are examples of new ML-based solutions that promise to accomplish more with less data by tracking and targeting users based on predictions and relying less on individual IDs to track user interactions.
AI enables advertisers to follow users' entire journeys across all devices in addition to 'filling the gaps' where users have chosen not to consent to data collection.
AI-based contents prefer changes in the content, which would remain most important in creating the innovation that would rarely change the aspects in the best way of leading the creative innovation.
Another increasingly popular AI-based technique is contextual ad targeting: A website's content is analysed by AI to identify which adverts are most appropriate to show to a user. It's not exactly a creative idea; rather, it functions more quickly than a billboard advertisement for vehicles would on a highway.
TV and radio commercials haven't included cookies in years, yet they're still effective. However, they might be better off sticking with the highway billboard for the time being, especially since one ad network recently hailed a three per cent increase in purchase intent as a huge victory for contextual targeting.
The jury is yet out on whether AI will be the solution marketers are searching for to deal with a cookie-free future because the technology is still in its early stages. There are some encouraging developments with the introduction of Google's GA4, but consent is still at the centre of the data sovereignty movement and is not expected to change.
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