Cookies & Monsters
Chris O’Hara ’90 of Salesforce is helping companies ethically navigate the evolving world of digital marketing and consumer data.
There’s an iconic scene in Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report (a sci-fi thriller) in which Tom Cruise walks through a shopping mall, a steady stream of jabbering digital billboards scanning his retinas and instantly plying him with personalized advertisements that call his character out by name and even reference past purchases.
That movie is set in the year 2054. But today, we already have much of the technical capability to create the type of intrusive consumer experience Spielberg’s film envisioned, generating unprecedented opportunities for businesses and organizations to reach their customers, clients and audiences with precision-targeted strategies. This can be a double-edged sword, offering consumers more-personalized marketing and advertising and introducing them to products they love while also presenting a potential slippery slope into privacy violations and misuse of online data.
“The challenge is striking a balance,” says Chris O’Hara ’90, P’24, VP of global product marketing in the Data and Identity Group at Salesforce, a cloud-based software company that provides customer relationship management services. “People really want personalization, but they also want privacy. And now, either because of new state-level laws or because of voluntary company policies, organizations are looking at how to start collecting data from consumers in a more responsible way and still offer that personalization.”
Salesforce, with its headquarters in San Francisco, has grown exponentially since its founding in 1999, with 60,000 employees and more than $21 billion in revenue for the 2021 fiscal year. And as the world’s digital reliance continues to spread, Salesforce and its subsidiaries are expected to see steady revenue growth in the years to come.
Tech giants like Apple and Google are dramatically changing the way they use and share personal data, and many companies are now scrambling to adjust to the new challenges to marketing and advertising as their access to that data becomes increasingly limited.
But while the privacy landscape is certainly changing in the U.S., not everywhere in the world is following suit. While Europe led the way with its highly restrictive General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, Japan has taken a different approach. There, billboards have been equipped with facial recognition cameras so they can identify a person’s gender and age as they’re walking past and instantly tailor ads to them, not unlike the scene in Minority Report. The technology is intended to be anonymous, but it isn’t a giant leap to totally personalized advertising, and that raises enormous privacy concerns. Facial recognition technology is becoming so common that many of us unlock our phones with it now. Beyond the business and advertising implications, there are also questions about data obtained by government and law enforcement entities. The FBI alone has access to nearly half a billion images for facial recognition uses.
Traditionally, data from various websites is aggregated and profiles are built based on site visits. Lots of the browsing data on laptops, and desktops are captured via “cookies,” or little snippets of code that identify users and store their data. Mobile phones and other web-connected devices (even some refrigerators) also capture behavioral data. Widely available for purchase on open marketplaces, this consumer data can include credit scores, online behavior, a person’s specific interests, particular websites they’ve visited—all information collected and shared almost entirely without the knowledge of the precise individual. If you have ever looked at a pair of shoes online and then noticed ads for those exact same shoes that follow you to a series of other websites, such as news sites, that is part of what cookies do.
A big development in data regulation came in 2018, when California passed the California Consumer Privacy Act, requiring more transparency and limits relating to data use. That’s when you may have started noticing the ubiquitous pop-ups on websites asking you to opt in or out of a company’s data collection or cookies policy.
Google has said it plans to enforce new policies by next year, depriving marketers of the ability to purchase the type of data they’ve long treasured. Exactly how consumer relationships are built moving forward and how marketers and advertisers ply their online trade will most likely involve a blend of new tactics and strategies that will replace the use of third-party cookies, which have been a central component of online advertising for years.
“One idea is something called FLoC—Federated Learning of Cohorts,” O’Hara explains. “The way that would work is Google will identify somebody as belonging to one or multiple cohorts, which are basically groups based on people’s interests. So you might be in the fashionista cohort, or the traveler cohort, or the outdoors-enthusiast cohort, and you’ll be assigned this random number and Google will build these various FLoCs as long as there are enough people who meet the criteria.”
This type of group-level web tracking would represent a significant shift for how advertisers identify new potential customers. Instead of companies targeting the browsing history and hyperspecific consumer data about individuals, they’ll now be forced to settle for information about various cohorts as a whole.