INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Jascha Kaykas-Wolff
Contributor
Jascha Kaykas-Wolff is CMO of Mozilla.
These are dark days for trust
Darkest of all for marketers and advertisers.
Only 3% of people trust marketing and advertising, the lowest of any industry or practice, and
that trust is falling fastest among millennials, an ominous sign for the future.
We have no one to blame but ourselves.
Like everyone else,
we&ve been blinded by the promise of tech false promise of &Big Data Solves Everything.& Martech is driving the dialog in our industry right
now, and they&re telling us that collecting as much consumer data as possible — regardless of the actual value of that data, and
regardless of our consumer best interests — will reveal a magic growth formula.
That a farce
There is no magic growth formula, and tech won''t do your job for you
Believing that amassing data will save your business instead of focusing on fundamentals has only led to lazy marketing, plummeting consumer
trust and a two-fold increase in the number of expensive martech solutions over the last two years.
Public awareness of the surveillance
The press is increasingly paying attention to business AND advertising practices
Consumers are voting with their wallets and choosing to walk away from companies that don''t practice the values they preach
This is a trend that will speed up, not slow down
The skepticism that has recently emerged around Amazon new Alexa announcements is just the most recent example of this.
How soon before
marketers and advertisers end up on The New York Times naughty list? How much longer will consumers tolerate the hypocrisy of brands
claiming to care for them while they vacuum up their personal data? Is it worth the risk to your brand and your business?
Doing what
right for your business means doing what right for your consumers.
If you are a marketer reading this: You can do better.
Being a
lean data company doesn''t mean being a martyr — just the opposite
The top 10 United States most trustworthy S-P 500 companies outperform the market by 25-50%.
But it does mean doing something
counterintuitive for many marketers in the era of big tech and adtech
It means striving to collect only the consumer data that you really need to give equal or greater value back to your customer — and
It means no more selling, sharing and buying user data
It means being transparent about your marketing practices.
Doing so will take your focus off data collection for the sake of data collection
and put that focus where it belongs — on understanding your customer needs, delivering them more and more value and regaining their trust
and respect.
This isn''t just empty talk.
At Mozilla we&re backing up this lean data commitment with action
In the spirit of truly putting our users& interests first, the latest release of the Firefox browser blocks third-party cookies by default
Frankly, we had anticipated some pushback from publishers, but instead they&ve told us they haven''t experienced the impact they expected,
which is pushing them to question the actual value of the data they&d been collecting and revisit their own practices.
A lean data movement
Others have taken action too, and there are many more who believe that doing what right for your business means doing what right for your
consumers.
So whatever your own lean data commitment looks like, make it now, before it too late
As marketers and advertisers, we&ve survived some seismic shifts over the last few years, but no one can survive 0% trust.
