Author: rssmasher

It’s time for banks to clean up their houses.

At least, that’s the message Bank of America svp Lou Paskalis sent last month when he announced the bank will hire a brand safety officer to ensure the company’s ads aren’t served up next to controversial content.

“I get a text from my chief financial officer every time there is news about a brand safety issue. I know why he is sending them to me… at some point he is going to say ‘gee is marketing safe to invest in?’ and we don’t want that,” he said.“We have to clean up our house right now.”

Paskalis is part of a growing, yet somewhat puzzling trend: Top marketers at giant financial institutions are becoming the new most vocal people demanding change in marketing, evangelizing a cleanup of digital media, or simply becoming more “woke.”

It’s perhaps a little ironic: These are heads of marketing at companies that are part of an industry still recovering from the reputational crises brought during the financial crisis. Their investment banking counterparts continue to rack up fines for things like anti-money laundering violations and market manipulation — things that have long run rampant in the industry and perhaps always will.

Read the full story on tearsheet.co

The post How bank CMOs became the new marketing evangelists appeared first on Digiday.

Baidu is coming for European advertisers, but it will stick to its strength — building technology — to facilitate this while an agency takes its ad business to market.

The approach is unconventional for Western technology businesses but aligns with how the Chinese equivalent of Google likes to do things. Like Baidu has done in parts of China where it does not have a sales team, the company tasked a local agency in Europe, long-term partner agency Forward3D, to drum up interest in ads spanning search, display, native and in-feed mobile ads.

“We’re an online business with strong technical capability,” said Linda Lin, Baidu’s gm. “Baidu wants to focus on where we’re strong, which is the technology side. Agencies are experts in industries our teams cannot really understand at depth. We see value in that knowledge as we try to grow.”

Forward3D’s London office will be the only agency Baidu permits to sell two courses to marketers and agency executives in Europe. The first course offers a basic rundown on search advertising on Baidu, which makes up the bulk of the 86 percent of its revenue it took from advertising in its most recent quarter, while the second course expands into both search optimization and its nascent native ad business. The plan, according to Lin, is to appoint other agencies in other international markets over the coming months.

Companies that complete either course are then given access to the Baidu platform in the hope that an influx of brands stems the flow of online searches and internet ads shifting to rivals such as WeChat and Tmall. Baidu’s share of the entire search market reached a two-year high last October, but that figure slumped to 60 percent last month, according to financial analysis firm The Motley Fool.

“There are a lot of Western brands that Chinese people could learn from, as the average spending per capita is on the rise,” said Lin of the scale of the opportunity behind Baidu’s pitch.

As small as the search engine’s native ad business is — it accounted for 2 billion yuan ($318.6 million) in 2017 compared to the 20.4 billion yuan ($3.2 billion) Baidu made from all ads in its most recent quarter — Lin is optimistic. There’s a growing demand for the ad format both in China as well as internationally, she said. In-feed environments, particularly in its news aggregation app, seem to be the most successful format for native ads. The problem is most Chinese native ads are not in-feed, consequently reducing their native effect.

“The mobile in-feed ads are a big thing because the overall targeting around interest clusters and affinity groups allow you to go for very specific groups,” said Hannes Ben, chief international officer at Forward3D. “Clients love that [level of targeting] because it gives them an opportunity to really relate to the right people.”

With far fewer regulations around personal data and privacy, companies will be able to access far deeper and richer data on their potential customers in China. Earlier this year, a Chinese consumer group accused Baidu of snooping on users of its smartphone app, while Tencent and Alibaba have been forced to clarify to the public how they handle personal data after coming under fire for the practices they use.

The post Baidu sets up shop in London to drive European expansion appeared first on Digiday.

Technology stocks are suffering one of their worst beatings in years, as investors reassess a sector that was once considered the growth engine of the global economy but now faces the prospect of greater regulatory scrutiny.

by Jon Hyman, co-founder and CTO at Braze

Modern life is creating a flood of information. In fact, 16 trillion gigabytes of data were created in 2016 alone, and that number is expected rise tenfold by 2025. Mobile devices allow brands to gather more nuanced customer data than ever before, providing actionable insights into what people value and how they engage–the kind of insights that strong customer relationships are built upon.

But these relationships are also built upon trust. Customers trust that brands will keep their data safe and private—and they trust them to use that data responsibly in turn. To earn that trust, brands need three essential things: a security philosophy, a plan to identify and address security needs and a clear roadmap.

 

Putting privacy and security at the core of your business

Keeping data private means being vigilant about managing access to information, and ensuring that you always understand where data is coming from, as well as understanding when it can and can’t be used. Something that’s much easier to accomplish if you emphasize data privacy and security across your organization from the start.

In turn, strong security requires a smart development process. If your company is pushing out code that is not being adequately reviewed, it is a security risk on par to a lack of traditional safeguards, such as firewalls and virus protection.

 

Demonstrating a commitment to security and privacy

Securing your data is essential, but it’s just as important to demonstrate your data security capabilities to customers and partners. Brands could consider putting together a security attestation roadmap featuring some of these common certifications and actions:

• Engage a security vendor to carry out digital security audits and penetration tests
• Evaluate security controls against the SANS Institute’s Cybersecurity Risk Framework
• Implement the U.S.’s Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)’s data privacy and security rules
• Complete the Service Organization Control (SOC) 2 Type 1 examination, developed to protect systems against unauthorized access
• Update data policies and contracts with technical partners to ensure material compliance with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) by May 25, 2018

Some of these steps can be accomplished in a matter of weeks, but others, such as the SOC 2 examination, can take more than 18 months from start to finish. The SOC 2 certification is the gold standard, as it touches on every element of security from physical infrastructure to software safeguards, as well as the procedures a company has in place for those with access to its systems.

It’s a major investment in time and resources, but a necessary investment all the same. By finding the certifications that are vital for your business and investing in expert legal and security guidance, brands can improve on data privacy and security while showcasing a commitment to data protection.

 

How to embrace a privacy and security practice

To ensure you are focusing your efforts, take a holistic view of the organization and use that understanding to complete a security risk assessment. For digital security, embrace traditional measures like firewalls, encryption and virus scanners, in addition to two-factor authorization and IP whitelisting, to prevent unauthorized access.

However, digital security isn’t just about keeping data safe from outside intruders—it also means using things like role and permission management to ensure that only the right members of your team have access to that data. Physical security matters, too. You can have world-class cybersecurity protections, but if you don’t secure your company’s physical assets by installing security cameras, requiring ID badges, maintaining maintenance logs and making sure that guests can’t just roam around your offices unescorted, you’re not really securing your data.

Security isn’t just about safeguards; policies and processes matter too. Role-based permissioning can’t work effectively, for instance, without a process for terminating access when employees leave the company. In addition, if your brand shares customer data with technical partners, you need to fully understand their security measures.

 

Privacy and security is a journey

Security doesn’t stand still. Technology keeps shifting, new threats continue to crop up, and last year’s secure system may suffer from previously unknown vulnerabilities today. Stay ahead by making security and privacy a priority every day by instituting strong processes, staying alert to the changing security landscape and choosing partners with the same mindset.

To dig a little deeper, check out #NoFilter: Braze on Security.

The post Make security a mindset appeared first on Digiday.

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