Christine Smith (left) and Derek Bhopalsingh. 

This story was originally published in the 2023 Summer issue of strategy.

Moderated by Josh Kolm, edited by Chelsea Clarke

Data and privacy have been foremost on the minds of the industry, and it’s not just because of innovation. The space is one undergoing massive change, be it because of new regulations (including Bill C-27 at the federal level, as well as Quebec’s Law 25 and British Columbia’s Bill 22) or the pending death of cookies transforming how ad targeting works at the most basic level.

This, of course, requires a lot of innovation to adapt, be it entirely new targeting methods or concepts like synthetic data and clean rooms to manage data and find insights in a privacy-safe way. But it is also leading many brands to rethink how they’ve used data in the past, and if there isn’t a better and more rewarding way to put that info to use.

The dust is far from settled, but those in the know have been thinking and testing and working on new solutions for long enough to provide their insights on what to expect. Strategy recently gathered a group of marketers and media agency execs to consider the challenges and opportunities to be found in this new data- and privacy-first world.

Present to discuss were Gautham Pingal, EVP, performance and innovation, EssenceMediacom; Derek Bhopalsingh, EVP, platform media, Publicis Media; Christine Smith, director of marketing, Hyundai Canada; Emma Eriksson, VP of marketing and wellbeing, Kellogg Company; Brian Cuddy, SVP, responsible media solutions, Cossette Media; and Cyrus Irani, director of digital strategy, Go RVing.

Moderating the discussion was Josh Kolm, digital editor of strategy and Media in Canada. Also in attendance were Andrew Saunders, chief revenue officer of The Globe and Mail, Neil Ewen, associate publisher of strategy and Media in Canada, and Lisa Faktor, publisher of strategy and Media in Canada.

The big looming change to how advertisers use data is cookie phase-out. Having seen and tested a lot of the post-cookie options, do you have any major concerns?

Gautham Pingal, EVP, performance and innovation, EssenceMediacom: I’ve made peace with the fact that this is going to be ambiguous for a while. Initially, we were waiting for the market to step up with more identifying solutions, but it moved at a snail’s pace, so we’ve started testing out different concepts by ourselves. I wish there was a more structured approach, and more time and options. We seem to be doing it like a bit of an underground project and waiting for someone to come and tell us, “This is probably the better way to do it.”

Derek Bhopalsingh, EVP, platform media, Publicis Media: At first, everyone had their foot down on the pedal, and then it got delayed, delayed again, delayed again. So everyone has taken their foot off the gas, which isn’t the right thing to do. One of the biggest challenges you’ve also had is a lack of consistency. It’s not as much about performance as it is our ability to measure and understand that performance. We’re seeing massive deltas, and for a lot of our marketers, those deltas aren’t acceptable, because they’re not able to quantify the return on investment. There’s not enough aggressiveness in the market, especially within Canada, to really nail down solutions.

Christine Smith, director of marketing, Hyundai Canada: We have the added wrinkle in automotive of exceptionally low inventory, so our low funnel is a little screwed up right now and doesn’t convert the same way. Sometimes there’s a long delay, sometimes that delay means that there’s a lack of a conversion and has nothing to do with the effectiveness of the advertising. But we’re definitely not seeing any kind of clear winners for solutions. We’re trying to keep a constant test and learn because we do know that we are going to have to completely recalculate all of our KPIs. If you have a year-over-year drop all of sudden, you’re going to have to explain it.

Emma Eriksson, VP of marketing and wellbeing, Kellogg Company: A lot of CPGs are still in the initial phases of really figuring out how to leverage data in the best possible way. We’re still building our use cases for future sales, so we have been focused on gathering more high-quality first-party data and doing a bunch of testing to add value to our targeting, retargeting and personalization. We don’t have the problems of having to re-examine established KPIs because we are still building for the new world.

Bhopalsingh: Hey, that puts you ahead of a lot of people…

Cookies aside, are any of the proposed solutions bringing any benefits you had been hoping for anyway?

Brian Cuddy, SVP, responsible media solutions, Cossette Media (pictured, left): Caring about the content is a big one that we lost in the digital attribution era. Targeting anyone at the cheapest cost you can possibly pay has resulted in a lot of problems. I think going back to smarter models that use algorithmic approaches to measurement will also show what’s more influential, and take some of that spend away from more nefarious places.

Smith: It’s added rocket fuel to our desire to integrate our data more effectively. We’ll probably place our biggest bet on a first-party data model, but we have limitations there. We exist in a bit of a fragmented data pool. We’ve got our own data, but also dealers, franchisees, telematics data that’s in the car. Who does that belong to and how can we bring it all together?

Cyrus Irani, director of digital strategy, Go RVing (pictured, below right): We’re in a similar position because we are a marketing arm. The benefit is we can test against predictive models, because we know who our audience is. We can look at different methods of understanding where those audiences might be. But we don’t get the final sales data. We can only lead customers to the gate and leave it open. So we’re giving customers tools that will help them enjoy the RVing lifestyle so they’re informed when they get to the dealer, and that data is coming to us. We do have a digital agency, and we’re trying to get them to practice with things that will let us be more economical with spending. Because with all these new technologies emerging, the cost of advertising is going up.

Pingal (pictured, near right): That’s my concern: is this going to add costs to what I’m already doing? Is this data, viewability and solution layer going to be another incremental cost that we need to eat within our marketing budget to get more efficiency? I keep thinking to myself: at what point is this going to stop? What I’m finding really interesting, and what we’re telling our clients, is that there’s just too much data noise out there, so let’s prioritize use cases. We’ve moved away from presenting all these different data sources that can’t be actualized, to putting the use case up front, which shows us a much simpler way to use that data. It also means clients don’t just come to us looking for sales, because sometimes the use case is organic brand or search keyword lift.

Are there ways data can be used in ways that aren’t just a ruthless pursuit of efficiency?

Pingal: I had a colleague summarize this as “how did we get so much more data and so much more stupid?”

Bhopalsingh: Short-termism is even more of a problem coming out of the pandemic, because we’ve got to recoup what we lost, and then we’re into further economic downturn. It’s created this hyper focus that we saw in and after 2008. Folks forget this when costs rise and they’re not seeing conversions, but in every economic downturn, consumers are more open to brand switching and incentives. So many brands die during these downturns because they’re so focused on short-termism. Yes, you have to keep running a business, but there needs to be a balance between short-term sales goals with driving that reason to believe, especially in an economic downturn where consumers aren’t as loyal as they used to be.

Smith: What’s the old adage? ‘There’s nothing like a crisis to give you an opportunity’? One blessing of supply chain challenges is that it allowed us to shift our approach. Instead of optimizing our media into a corner, we could turn our attention to optimizing creative. We’re following sales-oriented KPIs, but also brand metrics and connecting that to the activities we’re doing. At some point we’re not going to be able to make our systems any smarter, so we had to open the aperture on what we were optimizing. And because of removing cookies, it is going to get dumber, so we needed to find other ways to move the needle, and be the ones who were smarter.

Eriksson (pictured, left): I do think it’s very intoxicating, this drive of being able to measure everything. One thing I feel good about being a little old school is that we measure brand equity, brand power, we look at the whole funnel, as well as marketing mix modeling. The emotional connection and brand building is not just nice to have. When we look at our marketing mix modeling, that is still the highest ROI, especially if you can stretch it out over a masterbrand type of approach.

Irani: The metrics only get you to a certain point. For us, the data is about recalibrating the brand and almost mapping the demographic shift that’s happening. Our core demographic is younger than all of us in this room, but they’re
still emerging into the lifestyle, so our advertising is being used to target those demographics more intensely to bring them in a few years from now. Everyone wants success every year, but we have to play a longer game because it’s a longer term purchase.

Are there any new tools, capabilities or concepts out there that you find particularly exciting when it comes to the goals you’re talking about?

Cuddy: I’m excited about synthetic data for training and understanding. Thinking about how you can leverage algorithms to drive decisioning and connections in a very direct but automated way in the CPG and retail media spaces is exciting. But I think the really interesting part is: how do you get that into big platforms to start to really leverage the investments they make in their systems, which I don’t think Google or Facebook have much incentive to allow. If you think about the role Google plays in all of this, it’s hard to overlook what their incentives are.

Bhopalsingh: That’s one of the big challenges with all of these models, interoperability. I love what’s being done with synthetic data and the investment that’s gone into building some of these models, but we’re finding they don’t necessarily work with our ways of buying media. It’s worth the discussion at a very high level to see how different methodologies would work for your organization, but I would be careful of folks coming in with different tools to help cover how that’s applied. It’s still early days and it’ll get to that 95% or 100% accuracy, but models are only as good as the data going into it. And that’s the other issue in Canada: we’re data poor. You find the more robust data sets out there, for the time being, are probabilistic.

Is Canada data poor because of its population, or its ability to scale?

Bhopalsingh: Maybe that’s a dangerous term. Because Canada never gets the credit it deserves for protecting the privacy of consumers. PIPEDA and CASL were leading legislation, globally, at the time they were introduced. It protected Canadian consumers from things other markets struggle with, and that’s a good thing. So maybe I’ll rephrase it from “data poor” to “being more challenging for marketers to have the same ability to get one-to-one connections as they would in other markets.”

So are there any big “data gaps”?

Eriksson: A lot of options are still very U.S.-centric. They have the scale to put lots of money into buying data sets and marrying that with first-party and transactional data, and a lot of systems are based on that. That doesn’t work in Canada. We always have to build our own solutions that are more pragmatic and can scale here. And we don’t want to buy into all these big expensive tech stacks if we’re not going to get the same performance out of it.

Looking at data in Canada right now means also considering the impact of new privacy regulations. Is there anything in the regulatory landscape you see as cause for concern?

Bhopalsingh: The federal government should not rely on Quebec to lead the way. In the U.S., you have five or six states with their own privacy laws, and the IAB is working on a lowest common denominator approach for organizations to operate in a privacy-compliant way across all of them. We need to stay away from that if we’re going to be effective. The onus is on the federal government to stay abreast of what’s happening and not let the provinces take the lead. They’ve struggled to keep pace, and it’s going to be more difficult when things like generative AI come to the market.

What kind of onus do advertisers have to respect consumers’ privacy concerns, even if they aren’t being mandated to by law?

Cuddy: You should want to do it, not just because it’s the right thing to do but also because you don’t want to waste a ton of money building towards a privacy standard that’s going to change. Providing tangible value in exchange for access to data is where everything is going, and it is almost a personal relationship. It makes buying all this one-to-one, stitched-together data and putting it into a big platform, reselling it and making margins on every programmatic exchange ethically wrong.

Smith: It’s a quality versus quantity thing too. If you think about how you are going to move the needle on your KPIs, if you are going to use your data to make the experience better and higher quality, you are going to get more people to engage and do the behaviours you want them to do. The funnel might start smaller, but you bring more people through.

Pingal: We also keep waiting for legislatures to pass laws, when we are the ones in the thick of it. I believe advertising has a conscience, and there is an opportunity for us to define what is ethically right earlier on. We’re not great at moving early, when you look at drawing measurement standards, we still debate about what is an integrated measurement standard across channels. But if we can get away from that when it comes to using data, we can also drive more consumer confidence and break the perception that all advertisers are evil.

Cuddy: That’s kind of where we came from with the [CMDC’s] Canadian Media Manifesto. Recognizing that Canadian media is important and it is a big reason an ad-supported internet exists, but we need to understand the impact a quality advertising approach can have.

What are the big ways you think new regulations could change the way that brands and their agencies work?

Bhopalsingh: The bill tries to take the best of GDPR and CCPA, so a lot of us at bigger agencies have been operating in a way that’s compliant with those, and you won’t see a big change. The bigger change you’re going to see is in the Quebec marketplace.

Pingal: But we will need some conversation about what is and is not personally identifiable information. For me it feels like the question is constant, and we’ll need some level of standardization.

Cuddy: I’m wondering if that, plus cracking down on third-party data providers, then provides more value to originators of the data, like publishers. It may provide more incentives for direct relationships.