No. 130: 🔏 P&G Signs Up to UID2
🥠 Is it a workable cookie replacement?
Hello,
Happy September.
I’ve taken to a new working routine, inspired by / stolen from Beethoven. You see, he’d get up in the morning, count out his 60 coffee beans (always precisely 60), make a pot of mud, then work on his compositions all morning. In the afternoons, he read, walked, thought, and sought creative inspiration from the natural world.
We’ll see how long it lasts: my clients are based in the US, so it comes with some timezone challenges already.
I’m not a million miles from setting up one of these, like Homer did when he grew obsessed with Thomas Edison:
To chart my progress against Ludwig’s. My masterpieces: 0 - and counting.
Disney+ will reportedly launch in-app commerce features by year’s end
Scannable QR codes will take customers to a brand website to buy all sorts of tat.
I would see these QR codes as a necessary stepping stone towards a more integrated shopping experience. This will help Disney work on the tech and logistics to sell within the Disney+ viewing experience in future. Imagine, say, buying a Ratatouille chef’s hat without even having to pause the movie.
WhatsApp’s super app ambitions are starting to come true in India
WhatsApp commerce has launched in partnership with ecommerce company JioMart with an initial focus on groceries.
QQ: Does anyone - anyone at all - want to use WhatsApp to buy groceries?
I get why WhatsApp wants to sell groceries through its app. Jeff Bezos has always seen groceries as the holy grail for Amazon, because people will always need them. It doesn’t mean that people want to buy fresh produce from Amazon, though.
Facebook just scrapped its live shopping feature, because people weren’t on Facebook to watch shoppable videos. You’d wonder what customer research told them people wanted to buy their watermelons off WhatsApp.
No doubt they’ll add AR at some stage and we can all collectively shrug again.
TikTok Signals: Your secret to unlocking e-commerce sales
“Signals” are just actions a user takes: Watching a video, clicking a link, adding to cart, and so on. Brands can import their own data from other channels too, which TikTok will combine with its own on-channel signals.
The idea is to build a picture of the customer journey, beyond just views/clicks. Well, the idea is for TikTok to get its mitts on more data, but the sales pitch is the former.
Google is pitching this to advertisers too with its Signals feature in Performance Max campaigns. Yes, these companies do have to copy each other.
Reddit Acquires Spiketrap
Spiketrap offers contextual advertising technology, meaning it assesses on-page content and adapts the accompanying ads to make them more relevant. Since Reddit is home to a lot of conversations, you’d imagine that could come in handy - especially as advertisers move away from invasive, cookie-based tracking.
Reddit said: “We expect Spiketrap’s technology will help improve Reddit ad relevance and performance through upleveled targeting, quality scoring, and engagement prediction.”
It’s hard to be a moral person. Technology is making it harder.
A fabulous read from the Vox team about the impact of new technologies (mainly social media) on our ability to empathise.
Some highlights:
“The idea that you should practice emptying out your self to become receptive to someone else is antithetical to today’s digital technology, says Beverley McGuire, a historian of religion at the University of North Carolina Wilmington who researches moral attention.
“Decreating the self — that’s the opposite of social media,” she says, adding that Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms are all about identity construction. Users build up an aspirational version of themselves, forever adding more words, images, and videos, thickening the self into a “brand.””
“Technology may have caused some problems — but it can also fix them. Why don’t we build tech that enhances moral attention?”
The challenge lies in finding a way to do it that also makes money:
“Facebook ran experiments in 2020 to see if posts deemed “bad for the world” — like political misinformation — could be demoted in the News Feed. They could, but at a cost: The number of times people opened Facebook decreased. The company abandoned the approach.”
Facebook is never the solution to anything, of course, but this is still an instructive example of what would happen elsewhere. As is so often the case, we’ll need a new business model to get better results.
P&G Is the Latest Brand Supporting Alternative Identifier UID2
Unified ID 2.0 (UID2), developed by the demand-side platform The Trade Desk, promises advertisers a way to continue using first-party data without breaching privacy laws. It has been around for a little while (2020) but it is gathering momentum as big advertisers sign up.
How does UID2 differ from third-party cookies?
In short: it uses hashed and encrypted email addresses to identify users. (Technical details on Github here, although they don’t give full transparency on how they encrypt consumer details.)
UID2 is a deterministic identifier that uses Personally Identifiable Information (PII) to verify users, without storing the data on a web browser.
Step-by-step, it goes like this from an advertising perspective:
The user visits a website or app.
The site/app is responsible for securing the user’s consent preferences and gathering the user’s authenticated PII.
The site then sends the PII (an email address) to their UID2 provider, which generates a token.
<script>
__uid2.getAdvertisingToken();
</script>This is managed by a centralised system that holds (and frequently rotates) encryption keys. (It’s still unclear who exactly will assume this role.)
The site can now use this token to sell advertising impressions. The tokens are ephemeral, preventing adtech platforms from storing data about users over time to build profiles.
On the demand-side, platforms receive raw UID2 tokens from brands and publishers that have secured consent from their users. The demand-side platforms (DSPs) receive decryption keys from the UID2 provider to help recognise users and place bids.
If a user has opted out of UID2, the DSP automatically blocks bids that use their data.
So all in all, the advertisers would be able to overlay their first-party data on the data publishers have about those same users, without any PII passing through different owners.
All parties who use UID2 must also agree to a set of conditions about how it will be used. (This doesn’t happen with cookies.)
We covered cookies in a lot more detail in this edition of hi, tech., but suffice to say there are a lot of notable differences:
If you are familiar with user ID-based tracking, this will sound pretty familiar. There’s a reason it’s called UID2, after all.
Who is using UID2?
UID2 has signed partnerships with major retailers including Target as well as the likes of Disney.
Procter & Gamble has now signed up to use this identification system, meaning it can target customers across publishers that have also signed up to UID2. Of course, the customers would also need to be logged into the publisher so the platform could cross-reference their details.
This would mean, in theory, that Target could use UID2 to share more data about P&G’s in-store customers than it does at present. P&G could then combine this data with its own to create personalised ads on publisher websites.
It is important to note that all online customer data is networked. For instance, the data about your social media interactions will necessarily be connected to that of your friends. This means that it is very difficult to separate the data out and keep it discrete, with each customer having a profile - especially if the majority of these customers opt out of sharing the data. Even those that do share their profiles will offer an incomplete view.
UID2’s chances of success rest on the creation of a new ecosystem of users, brands, publishers, adtech platforms, and authenticators. That’s why the P&G announcement could generate a lot more support for the new standard from all the required parties.
Well, all the required parties in the advertising world.
But will UID2 be acceptable to regulators?
It really is unclear that UID2’s self-professed “layers of security and privacy measures” will be sufficient to appease regulators. AdExchanger reports that the initiative was “born from recent meetings in Cannes” and that sounds about right, if we assess the creators’ priorities.
UID2 has it all figured out - except, well, who will be responsible for authentication and how they will ensure users’ rights are protected. From my research, I would suggest that any successful cookie replacement will tackle this question first, not last.
The UK’s Information Commissioner wrote in 2021 that digital advertising might take inspiration from the Open Banking initiative, which allows individuals to control and then share their own financial data with other organisations. Instead, UID2 leaves it up to individual companies and publishers to ask for PII.
Nor is it clear, whatsoever, that customers would ever, being in their right minds, opt into this tracking. We have already seen with Apple’s iOS updates (14.5+) that when presented with the choice to avoid tracking, the majority of users will take it. A lot of sites already ask us to share our details when we land on the homepage, so how would UID2 differentiate itself anyway?
There is a shallow understanding of the user’s psychology when faced with this choice. Too much emphasis is placed on satisfying advertisers, who just want their results. That’s fine, but they won’t get them any more without persuading users. You would have thought an industry that chunters on endlessly about “customer-centricity” would have cottoned on by now.
As a starter, there are two broad concepts of data privacy that could influence a user’s decision to share their information:
Intrinsic value: “Privacy matters to me as a matter of principle”
The user has a deep sense that their data is their own and they should control its use.
Scandals like Facebook/Cambridge Analytica and the enactment of privacy regulations (EU GDPR, etc.) are likely to heighten consumers’ awareness of privacy issues, which could in turn increase consumers’ intrinsic valuation of privacy.
Instrumental value of privacy: “What a company does with the data determines my view of privacy”
While the intrinsic component of privacy can be viewed as being formed internally by consumers, the instrumental component is determined externally by brands’ strategic reactions to consumers’ privacy choices.
In other words, the company can make the case to the user that sharing their data will be mutually beneficial.
UID2 takes the advertiser-centric, and frankly myopic, view that customers would opt in because in return they will see personalised ads. It is a way to retain the status quo when the status quo is barely palatable to users. The instrumental value of privacy states that users can be persuaded; but first, we need to take on board what they want.
With that in mind, does UID2 stand a chance?
No-one would expect a new solution to have all the answers already. Google keeps pushing back its cookie replacement, whatever it will be, because it can’t get this right. That buys the rest of us more time to figure out an alternative, and I would propose that UID2 has the benefit of involving multiple parties, not just one giant tech company.
The offer of an open-source environment and external scrutiny of their privacy safeguards is a step forward from another Google-led and Google-approved vision of the future.
There is still a sense that any workable solution will have to make a compromise. The likely route to approval from regulators would put customers first and force the advertising side to take the hit, at least in the immediate short-term.
UID2 sees its route to success as “Cannes to can-do”, putting advertisers at the heart of a new system. To my mind, that means necessary - and unwelcome - compromises on data privacy, without offering the user much in return.