Delivering personalized experiences, at the right time, in the right channels — and with the right permissions

As 2022 came to a close, I addressed the topic of marketing responsibly with customer data. My goal was to help elevate the marketer’s role as a data steward by demystifying concepts of data governance, consumer privacy, and system security. At the time, lines were blurred across these distinct concepts, the GDPR had been in effect for six years, and marketers were scrambling to understand the implications of CCPA’s evolution to CPRA, which went into effect a month later.

Today, the world of privacy regulation remains disjointed. According to the International Association of Privacy Professionals, there are 36 state comprehensive privacy bills being addressed in the United States alone, with 17 of them signed into law. The US is also reviewing how to structure consumer privacy guidelines at the federal level with the American Privacy Rights Act of 2024 (APRA). Around the world, over 120 regulations are in process or in place, customized by country.

It’s safe to say that fragmented consumer regulation is here to stay.

The modern marketer is familiar with pivoting when paradigms shift

Early in my career, I remember building media plans in Excel, faxing insertion orders, and advocating for investing in digital channels. Today, there are integrated martech stacks for content, data, and journey orchestration, as well as the talent ecosystem to support the delivery of personalized experiences across online and offline channels. The modern digital marketer understands how to collect, ingest, manage, and activate customer data, shaping memorable digital-first customer experiences. The introduction of the vice president of martech has become a steady trend across industries, supporting both the CTO and the CMO, and now the CPO.

Innovations to support data subject rights, create data usage policies, and scale downstream processes are available out of the box with the most sophisticated customer data platforms (CDPs). For example, CDP evaluations should not only assess how the product enhances systems security, but also how it streamlines the automation of manual compliance tasks that take up IT teams' valuable time. With Adobe Experience Platform, we have empowered the privacy stewards to build automated policies (consent, data use, encryption, and access control) in a flexible UI and put them into action in Adobe Real-Time CDP. Marketing teams must be able to successfully set up specific use cases while staying mindful of user consent and preference.

According to Carly Chuich, an expert solution consulting leader for Adobe Experience Platform, it’s important to be aware that avoiding tech debt is a priority when selecting a CDP. Drawing from her extensive experience assisting global brands with customer data management, here are several key questions she poses to avoid common pitfalls when evaluating a CDP:

• Is the solution able to surface marketing intent?
  Most composable CDPs are not aware of the marketing intent or purpose of data, capturing only a “yes” or “no” for consumer consent. With Real-Time CDP, marketers can bridge customer data with data usage policies specifically for marketing, providing context for how to honor consumer preferences by purpose. For example, Real-Time CDP can be set up to understand that it’s okay to use customer data for personalization in social media but not for email targeting. This functionality allows data stewards to add appropriate guardrails, ensure compliance, and respect customer preferences.
• How does the solution integrate with consent management platforms (CMPs)?
  Adobe Experience Platform not only has a tried and trusted, patented governance framework, but Adobe also has a partnership with the leading consent management vendor.
• Will the solution scale as you grow and the ecosystem evolves?
  For example, if zero data copy is a concern, it’s important to recognize that activation outside of a composable CDP is still one data copy. Ultimately, the only way to truly guarantee security and privacy and maintain complex data integrity is through future-proof automated enforcement with hybrid deployment options, depending on the inherent risk of the use case.

Inviting the CMP to join the martech stack

With Real-Time CDP, digital marketers can build actionable profiles that provide a unified view of their consumers. Brands can connect various marketing systems — like Adobe Analytics or a CRM — to source signals of engagement and merge these signals with people-based identities. Marketers can then create clusters of these profiles to build high-value audiences for activation across channels, such as social or email. Too often, consent and preference systems are an afterthought as data sources for enriching a unified profile. As brands consider how to build, consolidate, and maintain martech stacks, collecting consent and preference data can provide a streamlined mechanism for building permission-based audiences across the customer lifecycle.

Traditionally, we start building our martech stack based on which signals help us understand how our consumers interact with us. We ask questions of the data, which then drives the systems that need to be integrated to better understand our customers, what they do, and how to group them for efficient campaign execution.

“Collecting and activating customer data in respectful and transparent ways could not be more important,” says Alex Cash, director of strategy at OneTrust, a data privacy provider. “We’ve seen an increase in evaluations for our solution, especially with brands looking for a robust program for collecting consent and respecting it throughout their martech stack. With direct integrations with solutions such as Adobe Real-Time CDP, marketers are empowered as data stewards to both honor the wishes of customers while maximizing the business value of the data we are trusted with.”

The diagram below provides a cheat sheet for creating a strategy from person to audience. It’s important to understand preference signals before tying these signals to durable identifiers. With this first-party data foundation in place at the person level, the next building block of the unified profile is to enrich with signals of behavior, engagement, and interest. Finally, high-value audiences can be created and tested based on campaign priorities, use cases, and activation channels.

Investing in privacy by design innovation — going beyond table stakes

Adobe embedded the concept of privacy-by-design into product innovation before any legislation required a set standard. With Adobe’s patented data usage labeling and enforcement (DULE), IT compliance teams can scale and automate cross-channel data usage policies based on data type, contractual obligations, and use case. New labels are available out of the box as new features are launched. Built on principles of trust as outlined by regulators, thought leaders, and privacy experts, the Trust Toolkit in Real-Time CDP provides comprehensive frameworks to flexibly and easily manage system access, data subject rights, system security, and more.

“The days of consumers handing over data are gone,” says Elizabeth A. Sexton, who leads product development for trust features in AEP applications. “Now consumers expect brands to develop a relationship with them to determine how comfortable they feel in sharing their valuable data. It is up to the brand to be sure their stewardship of consumer data will meet customer expectations. This is why having a toolkit at the ready — with the capabilities to practice data lifecycle management, data minimization, data security, and more — is essential in creating trusted consumer experiences. Product innovation must consider all of these trust and data stewardship factors from cradle to grave to be sure that the tools will align with their organizational privacy and security values.”

The importance of partnering with your privacy and legal teams

Adobe experts are eager to help you through your journey building exceptional experiences — with trust at the forefront. To get a head start, we encourage you to consult your privacy and legal teams to build bridges and inspire an ongoing dialogue on responsible customer data management. Here are some example questions you could ask to start the conversation:

• What data types should the marketing team not ingest into a CDP?
• Which regulations are most important for our business, industry, and region? And how does that impact how I treat, manage, and expire customer data ingested into our CDP? Do we need to have a process for consumers to access, delete, and update their data?
• How should we manage privacy considerations associated with cross-device tracking? What are the most important contractual and identity level data usage policies that we need to enforce through marketing channels such as social, advertising, and email?
• What is the best cadence to meet throughout the year to stay up to date on these topics?

Change is the only constant

It will be interesting to see where we are as an industry a few years from now. Will regulators consolidate consumer privacy bills to simplify execution for the martech ecosystem? Will my marketing team finally be seamlessly working with our privacy and compliance team, or will we be in the same place we are today? Only time will tell. In the meantime, here are some recommended resources to help guide your responsible marketing strategy:

• Adobe Study: Brands that rely too heavily on third-party cookies are leaving money on the table today, risking long-term business harm
• Adobe Experience Platform Data Governance
• A Martech Guide to Building a Foundation of Trust - S504
• Permission-based personalization: The power of OneTrust and Adobe

Special thanks to these Adobe team members for contributing their expertise to this article: Carly Chuich, group manager, expert solution consulting; Elizabeth A. Sexton, director of product management; and Tonia Hashimoto, product legal counsel.

Rakhi Patel is a product marketing director at Adobe, leading the global go-to-market strategy for the industry’s top customer data management solutions. With 20+ years of experience in the digital marketing industry, Rakhi has led vision, strategy, and thought leadership across key areas of discipline such as responsible data management, partnerships, and value realization. Passionate and customer obsessed, Rakhi is dedicated to elevating the marketer’s role as a data steward.

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