Partner Spotlight: Marketing & Data Privacy Are Changing Radically—Here’s How to Handle That

How can marketers respond to upcoming data privacy-related changes recently announced by Apple and Google? And how can brands and retailers continue to provide personalized customer experiences (CX), now that it’s getting harder to recognize each consumer identity—complete with each individual’s interests, preferences, and behavior? These are questions for experts, and Jason Skelton, Acxiom’s Head of EU Platforms, certainly qualifies.

In addition to professional technology and business consulting services, Acxiom offers an easy-to-use Treasure Box plugin for its Profile Enrichment and Real IdentityTM via Treasure Data Enterprise Customer Data Platform (CDP). Recently, Treasure Data’s Jonathan Von Abo and Skelton discussed these topics and more, and the interview is summarized here.

Treasure Data: What’s one major challenge you’re helping your clients with today?

Jason Skelton: Confusion about how to deal with the coming cookieless world is a big issue. Data has always been the lifeblood of marketing and creating personalized customer experiences. Right now, collection and quality of first-party data makes earning the trust of customers—so that they’re willing to share personal information for personalized offers and services—is more important than ever.

But at the same time, the way that companies use that information is changing, both because of new regulations and evolving consumer opinions about what they consider fair, responsible use of their data. Whether that be Google’s recent cookie announcements or the more recent news regarding Apple’s iOS15 release, Acxiom is spending its time helping clients to navigate through those changes. Having long held to the highest standards of transparency and ethical data use, we are excited to see other industry leaders take on consumer privacy concerns.

Treasure Data: What’s a specific piece of advice that could help marketers get the data they need, while still meeting customer expectations?

Jason Skelton: One way to deal with the changing marketing landscape is to use the right martech to ensure that the data you collect is secure and meets privacy expectations, and stays under your own control.That way, you can decide how to react to changes in policies by third-parties such as Apple and Google.

For example, the beauty of Acxiom’s Real Identity-enabled, first-party solution is that it’s YOURS. In a world where publisher and platform ecosystems continually change their policies, Acxiom has strategies and tools that will put you back on a solid foundation of consumer engagement and make you less susceptible to the shifting sands of the ongoing announcements across the industry.

Treasure Data: How do you see CDPs playing a critical role in helping companies grow in the future?

Jason Skelton: Consumer expectations have evolved rapidly, and seamless integration of digital and offline experiences at every interaction and touch-point is now almost a standard requirement. These expectations present the daunting task of integrating an often fragmented view of the customer across business functions, technologies, and interactions.

This is where tools like CDPs come in. CDPs make these tasks less daunting, and they’re a key enabler of both change and privacy. Fundamentally, to transform customer experiences, you need customers to trust you enough so that they’re happy to openly share their personal data with you so you can then tailor their experience. As the CDP Institute’s David Raab has pointed out, CDPs can play a critical role in tracking people’s privacy preferences for each bit of data collected about them, and then helping automate compliance with their preferences. In that way, you can build their trust, and then keep it.

The CDP is fundamental to that. It’s a tool that helps you make sense of all of the data signals created by your customers, and this in turn allows you to orchestrate and curate the best possible experience for them.

Treasure Data: How does the Treasure Data CDP fit with your company’s offerings?

Jason Skelton: Of course, no single tool or platform can solve all the complex challenges brands face, but you’re better off with proven omnichannel solutions powered by experienced professionals from organizations like Acxiom and Treasure Data, because they have the tools and the expertise to orchestrate and connect data between online and offline environments. This connection is essential for successful marketing.

The bottom line? Brands must better understand and connect with people, and knowing who individuals are, and what the cross-channel data tells us about their preferences is crucial. CDPs help to automate the things you need to do to make these connections with each and every customer, creating the potential for enormous value for the brands that use them and the customers who interact with those brands.

Treasure Data: How does that help marketers provide more personalized CX?

Jason Skelton: In reality, being customer-centric means putting relevant, timely data and insights first. In recent research from Acxiom and the Martech Alliance on the state of B2C data driven marketing, which surveyed over 200 CMOs in the B2C space, over 70% agreed that they recognized the importance of CDPs to the successful delivery of their B2C data driven marketing strategy for delivering truly enriched customer journeys.

Customer expectations have reached the point where one-to-one personalised experiences are considered to be the norm. It’s our job to help clients make sense of customer data and show them how to apply it to their business strategies to drive the right business outcomes. Treasure Data’s CDP is fundamental to the execution of those strategies; it’s the key enablement tool to drive successful business outcomes.

Treasure Data: Could you please explain, technically, how Acxiom integrates with Treasure Data?

Jason Skelton: We have direct product integrations to Treasure Data—with more to come. We’ve spoken about the need for advertisers to have as complete a picture of their customers as possible. This requires accurate gathering and management of the advertisers’ own data, and access to high-quality, third-party data assets to enrich what they already know about their customers.

Acxiom is proud that its privacy-compliant data enrichment and identity services products are now available as an integration with Treasure Data’s Treasure Boxes, which is a library of pre-built sets of code and applications that help speed development and time-to-value. This serves two purposes. First, it helps marketers carry out data hygiene and identity resolution services. At the same time, it calls on Acxiom’s rich data assets to enrich customer data for more detailed profiles to make better decisions. Treasure Data customers get a single access point into Acxiom’s hygiene, identity, and data enhancement services.

Treasure Data: Any final messages you’d like to leave with our readers?

Jason Skelton: It can be a confusing and sometimes scary marketing landscape out there, but marketers have a variety of solutions available to use in their tech stack, and it is critical they’re integrated with CDPs and other other data enhancement technologies. It’s still possible to deliver superior insights and personalized customer experiences—all while handling customer data preferences sensitively—with the right martech choices.

For more information, check out Acxiom and Treasure Data: Better Together, How a Leading Motor Company Leveraged CDPs to Drive Media Optimisations and Building Consumer Confidence in Automotive in the New Normal.

About Acxiom

Acxiom enables people-based marketing everywhere through a simple, open approach to connecting systems and data to drive better customer experiences for people and greater ROI for business. A leader in identity, customer data management, and the ethical use of data for more than 50 years, Acxiom now helps thousands of clients and partners around the globe work together to create millions of better customer experiences, every day. For more information, contact Acxiom.

About Jason Skelton

As the Head of EU Platform Partnerships, Jason Skelton leads the team responsible for building out Acxiom’s platform alliances. This includes evaluating different marketing technologies to find those that enhance Acxiom’s proposition to its clients. Prior to this role, Jason led several of Acxiom’s major clients in the financial services and retail space. You can reach Jason directly at at jason.skelton@acxiom.com.