Month: February 2021

Many of the suits filed since the law went into effect Jan. 1, 2020, allege companies have failed to allow people to opt out from sale of their personal information or failed to disclose that the companies share people’s personal information with third parties, according to lawyers tracking CCPA lawsuits. Meanwhile, a spokesperson for California attorney general Xavier Becerra said the AG’s office has sent dozens of notices to companies demanding that they fix problems leading to noncompliance with the law.

A lawsuit testing phase is common when new laws are passed, said Alysa Hutnik, partner and chair of the privacy and security practice at law firm Kelley Drye and Warren. “Plaintiffs are trying to pressure-test all possible avenues.”

So far, because few of the cases related to these lawsuits have been concluded, the parameters for how the law can be applied remain murky. Lawyers interviewed for this story suggested no precedents have been set at this early stage.

Testing legal boundaries
The CCPA includes a private right of action that allows an individual or group to sue a company for data breaches that violate the law. However, in some cases, the individuals and groups of people filing these lawsuits are pushing the boundaries to test just what sorts of alleged violations they have the right to sue over according to the law, said lawyers tracking CCPA lawsuits.

In some cases, the lawsuits attempt to circumvent the CCPA’s private right of action limits by alleging companies have violated other California laws, such as the state’s Unfair Competition Law, according to data privacy and security lawyers. Some suits allege, for instance, that companies have made untrue statements if they claim they do not sell personal information when they actually pass it along to third-parties.

“The strategy seems to be to try boot-strapping CCPA onto some of the existing California privacy laws,” said Lee. Law firm Morrison Foerster reported this same trend.

Exactly how many CCPA-related lawsuits have been filed is unclear. Law firm Perkins Coie told Digiday that 101 lawsuits have been filed. Morrison Foerster, said in January, “Nearly 50 cases have been filed seeking damages under the CCPA, either in connection with data breaches or based on alleged violations of the Act’s other consumer rights (with even more using the CCPA to add context to other privacy-related claims).”

Dozens of notices to publishers from the California AG
Then there are the warnings. In addition to lawsuits, the California AG’s office has sent notices to firms such as retail, financial and health-related website publishers to inform them that they are not compliant with the law. These violations include failing to respond appropriately to people requesting their data be deleted or not sold or failing to update company privacy policies, according to Dominique Shelton Leipzig, partner and co-chair of ad tech privacy and data management practice at law firm Perkins Coie.  

The “notices to cure” sent by the AG’s office give companies 30 days to make changes to comply with the law. The notices are not publicly available, and the number of notices sent is confidential, according to the California AG’s office spokesperson, who described the figure as being in the “dozens.”

Shelton Leipzig said some website publishers have received notices if their websites state only that they share data with “advertising partners” rather than listing specific partner companies by name.

Other enforcement notices have plucked at low-hanging fruit, said Dan Jaffe, group evp of government relations for the Association of National Advertisers. “It was often, ‘Where’s your opt-out button?’” he said.

A temporary cure
Firms that do not make adjustments to satisfy the AG’s demands within the 30-day remedy window may go into a negotiation period, said Lee. Then, if negotiations don’t lead to a satisfactory fix, she said, “That’s when we’ll start to see public enforcement by the attorney general.” That could come in the form of civil penalties of $7,500 for each post-notice violation.

The 30-day compliance leeway afforded companies that receive these types of notices will go away, though. California’s updated privacy law, the California Privacy Rights Act passed last year, which will replace the CCPA when it goes into effect Jan. 1, 2023, does not have that provision.

“The CPRA does not have the 30-day cure,” said Jaffe. “So things may become a little bit more intense.”

“Everyone is nervous about the future and how the performance of their advertising is going to take a hit whenever Apple’s changes do arrive,” said Bryan Karas, CEO of performance marketing agency Playbook Media. “I wouldn’t say anyone is trying to frontload budgets or make big commitments to another platform because there’s so much uncertainty.”

Still, provisions must be made for the short term, particularly for those marketers relying on in-app ads to drive installs or a purchase. They can’t afford to stop all campaigns on Apple. Not when those people have a higher lifetime value and usually spend more than those on other mobile devices. But those marketers do have to be even more prudent with their media dollars on iOS during these times of uncertainty, and sometimes that means moving some money over to the other dominant mobile platform — Android. 

“We are definitely seeing this trend happening,” said Sergio Serra, senior product manager for the supply-side platform strategic business unit at ad tech vendor Inmobi. “Without a consistent identifier for iOS supply, and until the point Google officially moves into a similar regimen, marketers are actually more likely to keep the status quo and temporarily outclass the importance of iOS for their media plans.”

Fewer dollars spent on iOS could help ease pressure on contingency plans — at least until the furor over advertising on Apple subsides. It’s a stop gap of sorts, albeit one that might provide a rudimentary shield against the inevitable performance slump that will come once Apple’s anti-app tracking plan starts. 

“Because there are a lot of unknowns around the impact of Apple’s move, some marketers are allocating budgets to places where they have more control over measurement i.e Android,” said Ido Raz, president and founder of ad tech vendor Bigabid. “It’s more like budgets are leaning more toward Android.”

Regardless, the amount of money moving away from iOS so far has been enough to have ruffled some publishers

“This immediately converts into an eCPM deflation for publishers, which in turn led to deemphasize their iOS investments,” said Serra. “Thus, publishers that used to be iOS-first are starting to reevaluate the importance of their Android apps, even in markets like the U.S. [that] is historically iOS heavy.” 

Some marketers have a more pragmatic view of the situation. Moving money between iOS and Android devices isn’t a zero-sum game in their eyes. The audiences between both platforms are too distinct from one another. So those marketers plan to maintain spending on Apple devices until the IDFA starts to dwindle. It’s just too early to do anything else. 

“From what we’ve seen, demand-side platforms are not pulling budgets away from iOS,” said a spokesperson for app monetization company Fyber. “Following IDFA deprecation, marketers may slow down spend on iOS initially — but will ramp back up using privacy-friendly contextual targeting.”

The rationale being that they can use the remaining weeks to test and learn.

Take Limit Ad Tracking (LAT). The feature lets iOS users opt out of targeted advertising similarly to how Apple’s upcoming privacy push works. So much so that some marketers are running campaigns targeted to those people who have enabled the feature. Doing so, gives them a chance to see how mobile ads performs on the back of non-personalized traffic. 

“Looking at preparation efforts, some DSPs have invested heavily in adapting to the new reality and making the transition to successfully run campaigns on IDFA-less (LAT) inventory, while others are lagging behind and some are still completely ignoring this inventory,” said the spokesperson from Fyber. “As the share of IDFA-less (LAT) inventory grows, companies who did not make the technological adjustments will have to shift focus to sources where users are still largely identifiable.”

Of course, these plans will likely change once Apple’s shift starts. Until then, however, advertisers will try to do what’s best for them.

“Marketers must ask themselves whether they’re happy with that first campaign report without Apple’s IDFA going to senior business executives,” said Canton Marketing Solutions founder Nick King. “For some brands, that report could say sales are down as much as 50% — Marketers will need to be able to say they have a plan.”

“Even though a large portion of employees may remain virtual, they’ll still need to come into the office for training and to collaborate,” said Michael McDaniel, VP and general manager of the Modern Workplace unit at Tysons, B2B IT services company DXC Technology, who shared that collaboration and flexibility are among the leading factors driving the IT business currently. 

But the return of in-person business hardly means the end of technology as a collaboration tool especially as companies continue to expand their offerings in this space, such as Microsoft Hub Room and Cisco Collaboration Room.

He noted that 15% of his clients used the virtual meeting software Microsoft Teams a year ago; now it’s greater than 80%. And Microsoft continues to remake our work lives. In early February, it unveiled Viva, an employee experience platform, to help motivate employees.

Marketing executives are busy preparing for this new, hybrid world of in-person and remote collaboration post-pandemic. 

Barry Lowenthal, CEO of the New York-based media agency Media Kitchen, with clients including Victoria’s Secret and Loews Hotels, sees emerging technologies as fostering the ease of working together. “All these technologies, from video to chat to better cloud-sharing tools, have just brought us closer together and allowed us to successfully service our clients and pitch new business,” he said.

Aside from helping along business through the pandemic, he expects them to continue to be a vital part of the business. “They are all going to become standard tools,” he said. “Anything that improves service and employee quality of life becomes standard.”

Even before the pandemic, B-Reel, a Stockholm-based creative agency, did a large amount of work for clients, which include H&M and Hyundai, on platforms such as Slack, Figma and Google Workspace, said Petter Westlund, co-founder and executive creative director of products and services at the company. “It just feels like we’ve evolved to more of a shared sense of remote work etiquette than we’ve had before,” he said. “Everybody has to invest in making collaboration work.”

While he believes virtual working is here to stay, Westlund is among those who look forward to a return to the physical headquarters. “The flexibility is great, but it also makes you appreciate the quality of interaction you get from being in person, and that there are benefits from the ritual of going to work and having a shared space with your colleagues, and clear boundaries between work time and free time,” he said.

Westlund envisions technology will help employers with not just collaboration, but other elements of the business, and in everyday life. “This is just the beginning,” he added.

Joshua Evan Greenberg, managing director at the Los Angeles creative studio Caveat, which has worked on campaigns for Amazon and Nike, points to the importance of a platform that’s become integral to many lives over the past year. He said around 20% of his company’s client communication and as much as 90% of internal communication are now happening by way of Slack, including communication between its live-action production teams.

The service has led to transparency as well as streamlined and expedited communication between its clients and creatives. The studio was able, for example, to seamlessly film a massive celebrity campaign for the new $6 billion SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California, during the height of the pandemic because its comms infrastructure enabled it to spend more time doing the actual work and less time talking about it. It also provided clients with the access and information they needed to work more confidently within their organizations. 

Caveat also implemented Frame.io as its cloud-based collaboration platform for post-production, allowing the studio to quickly provide feedback on work, optimize communication between creatives, project managers and clients and reduce oversight.

“We’re constantly looking for ways to leverage technology to eliminate waste, and to improve the quality of our work and the quality of our work lives,” Greenberg said. Benefits include the ability to maintain a smaller staff, reduce unnecessary communications, eliminate redundancies in task management, and increase productivity and human resources, he added. 

As breakthrough as these tech advances have been, Greenberg is also mindful of the need to not rely too heavily on them. 

One of the best parts of working in the creative industry is collaborating with like-minded individuals, he said. “If we forget to leverage video conferencing or schedule virtual brainstorming and ideating sessions, then individuals can begin to feel like they’re part of an assembly line. In these cases, the technology can work against employee or team morale,” he added.

The challenge, as ever, is balancing human and machine. As Greenberg put it: “We’re working hard to avoid mechanistic dehumanization.”

Here’s what we learned to help marketers spend smarter.

In premium content we trust

When it comes to advertising, trust is essential. And according to our study, when it comes to trust, not all content is created equal.

In the study, we found that premium content is seen as 14% more trustworthy than non-premium content. And trust us when we say trust matters: When controlling for all other variables to understand how individual content perceptions drive brand metrics, we found that high trust in content leads to a 10% increase in brand favorability and a 12% increase in purchase intent. We call this the “premium content halo.”

In-feed, indeed

There’s a second part of the equation that drives the impact of your pre-roll ads, and that’s the environment in which it’s consumed. Our study found that people feel less friction when watching pre-roll ads that appear in an in-feed environment like Twitter compared to non-feed platforms. And the ads themselves feel more relevant, too. In fact, just like trusted premium content, placing your pre-roll in an in-feed environment boosts brand metrics like favorability and purchase intent.

The numbers don’t lie; pre-roll ads in an in-feed environment drive 2.2X brand favorability and 1.6X purchase intent compared to the same pre-roll ads on a non-feed platform.

The best bang for your buck

We know marketers are on the hook for making sure their ad spend goes the distance.

“As digital video ad spend continues to rise, leading to a projected cost of $26.6 billion by 2025, it is crucial for marketers to understand how to enable deeper connections between people and the things that they love and care about,” says Stephanie Prager, Twitter’s head of global business partners.

Our research shows that in-feed pre-roll ads adjacent to premium content, like our Twitter Amplify ad solutions, actually drive cost efficiencies against some of the most important brand metrics.

In fact, our study found that pre-roll on premium content in Twitter’s in-feed environment provides an outsized return on a marketer’s budget: Compared to non-feed pre-roll, in-feed pre-roll was found to be 2.3X more cost-effective in driving favorability and 1.7X more cost-effective in driving purchase intent.

It’s not enough for marketers to simply create good ads; they also need to consider the context in which their ads are consumed. A few key decisions, such as placing your pre-roll in an in-feed environment adjacent to premium content, can make those precious few seconds go a long way for your brand’s bottom line.

The article ‘Study: For video pre-roll, context matters’ first appeared on Marketing.Twitter.com

Sources:
●  Magna & Twitter, The Value of Premium, USA, September 2020