If you didn’t realise that internet privacy has been tightening up immensely in recent years, then you should probably stop reading this and let someone manage your organisation until you’re back up to speed.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union, which strengthens the rights of individuals with regard to their personal data and imposes stricter requirements on organisations that collect and process such data, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), which provides similar protections for residents of California, and the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR) in the UK, which sets out rules for the use of electronic communications and marketing, have limited the customer data available to companies to understand who might be interested in their products or services.

As consumers, we’re reclaiming our right to explore silently, without being bothered by irrelevant noise from loud, rubbish advertisers.

When you combine these changes in law with Apple positioning itself as ‘privacy brand’ in its recent updates and changes to further strengthen its privacy protections, the success of marketing campaigns is getting harder and harder for brands to measure. And will only continue to do so.

 What will the future of marketing look like?

In ‘Traditional marketing is dead. Get over it.’, we highlighted the increasing suspicion with which traditional marketing is viewed by the millennial generation (and younger). This is compounded by the challenge of not knowing how your marketing efforts are landing with your target demographic, therefore we forecast some companies may continue with ineffective marketing campaigns and not ever know that it needs to change. Or worse, they’ll change the wrong components and sink the whole ship.

An option for dealing with this, is to trial lots of different marketing ideas and see what gets a bite through approved metrics (ie., those that are not vanity metrics). This approach is more like design thinking than logical reasoning, and could be a new style of video content, building a new online or offline community, generating first-person blogs (so that search engines don’t penalise your ranking potential for using AI-generated content), launching an innovative new podcast, trialling brand experiences, and everything in the marketing spectrum within reason.

Ultimately, we think this will mean some corporate cultures will have to change to allow brand teams to take creative risks, experiment, test the boundaries, in order for the whole ship to ultimately stay afloat. It won’t be pretty, but it will be necessary.

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