Could a Data Cooperative Redress the Imbalance in Digital Advertising?
John Roberts
Tech for Good │ Business Consultant │ Championing Touchscreen Technology in Special Education
The Rich get Richer
We all know that if an online service is free, then we are the product; “paying” for the service with our data, used to connect us with advertisers. Dominated by a handful of players, it is increasingly unwelcome to both people and regulators.
In 2021, Google, Meta and Amazon received around 2/3 of all digital advertising spend worldwide (1). Apple will soon join them, because having stopped cookies “to protect their customers’ privacy”, their advertising revenues are now rapidly growing (2).
At best, this is an unhealthy market imbalance. At its worst, around 15% of all spend remains unaccounted for... and fraudulent (3).
Redressing the Imbalance
Vendor Relationship Management solutions, placing control into customer hands, have been positioning for years with no clear winners. Ad blockers have achieved success, but then offering “approved” advertising to earn income (including for them) contradicts their purpose. And new Web 3.0 companies are creating distributed architecture solutions to reward users for activity with their own crypto-currencies. But they have yet to convince the wider public and, for now, seem too focused on their whizzy new technology.
How to start?
So, how does one compete with the digital advertising behemoths?
Well… Don’t !
Rather:
1.????? Create a new service to engage people directly.
2.????? With a 1st party user data relationship (under your T&Cs).
3.??????Building data profiles to personalise user experience.
4.??????Making the service interactive and entertaining.
5.??????Rewarding people fairly for their involvement.
It could be a social media service, such as Weare8, enabling user reward donations. Or perhaps an ad service sharing income with good causes, such as Good-Loop. ?
Or maybe something like this:
A service helping people to create and easily update their preferences, then enabling them to earn clearly specified rewards for the use of that data to personalise commercial communication with them. This could be achieved directly within the service or with trusted 3rd parties, unlocking their services.
The Secret Sauce
But services like that have been tried before. What’s the secret sauce that will allow something new to succeed where others have failed?
Well, I see three ingredients:
1.?????Total user control: this builds genuine trust, and can, without new techie solutions, rely on a model that has been around centuries created by and for communities: mutual companies, or cooperatives. A Data Cooperative ensures that any service must meet the needs of its members.
2.?????An 2-way, attributable channel for brands to communicate directly with people. With immersive messaging, users can view them if and when they choose and be rewarded for all of their interactions.
3.?????Most importantly, make it fun! Capturing genuine attention for, say, 2-3 minutes a day with playful commercial content generates high value, measurable interactions and serendipitous moments for readers.
All of which beats seeing 100s of ads a day online, interrupting what we’re trying to do and generating minuscule response and recall rates.
And, by the way, a data cooperative would be analogous to Google Chrome’s new “My Ad Center” (go on, take a look), enabling users to update their preferences, organised by “Topics”, albeit seemingly, in a post cookie world, for the continued benefit of… er… Google.
“The purpose of life is to contribute in some way to making things better.” (JFK)
A Data Cooperative, placing control into the hands of people, would be a step towards doing things the right way. And having an attributable, direct to customer (D2C) channel would generate fewer, but much higher value marketing transactions to help meet brand objectives, without bombarding everyone via the existing sausage factory of programmatic advertising.
?Could it? What do you think? Do get in touch.
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(1)?????FT (eMarketer), 2021