I sat down with marketing and healthcare CMO, CTO, and VP of Innovation Sean Shoffstall to chat about data and customers’ privacy. Here’s what he had to say about marketing morality, Meta, and putting trust first:
[This interview has been edited and condensed.]
How are your views of marketing changing in a post-IDFA /post-third-party cookie world?
There are new regulations but they’re still the same problems we’ve been talking about in marketing for the past 15 years. You need to understand your customers more on an individual basis. Doing that by having too many third-party cookies collecting humongous amounts of irrelevant data wasn’t helping you anyway. The regulations have made us default more toward first-party cookies where it’s a 1-1 relationship with the consumer to get more actionable data. Eliminating third-party cookies makes us better marketers in the long run.
We as marketers have created an industry built on the irresponsible use of customer data. There’s a lot of legislation around healthcare data and financial services data; if someone got information on the medication you’re taking, that’s personal and scary. But is that more dangerous than someone who can get into a marketing database and collect how many kids you have, where you live, and your geolocation between 10 am and 2 pm every day? Now regulators and big tech are stepping in to enforce a more transparent and moral framework. It’s out of our hands, as industry professionals, but it’s on us to take this opportunity and return to the principles of ethical and moral marketing.
With laws constantly changing in the space, how can marketers keep up?
If they start with thinking as a consumer and thinking about what they find ethical, they’ll be ahead of the lot. Marketers today need a principled mission statement covering data and privacy that’s detailed enough to guide tactical decisions in day-to-day partnerships and campaign executions.
How can marketers keep their customers’ trust in relation to data and their privacy?
- Don’t collect anything you’re not going to use. If you think you’re going to miss out on something, ask yourself what you are really going to do with that extra piece of data that you couldn’t do from everything else you’ve already collected.
- Don’t fear the cookie. Just be explicit about how you plan to use that data. A lot of people now are afraid of cookies, but without cookies, browsers and apps would need us to log into websites with every new page or product we view. Cookies are a good thing but it’s important for brands to say how they’re going to use this data they are constantly collecting.
- Don’t sell data to anyone. It’s important for brands to publicly take a stand against the sale or sharing of your data without explicit consent. When I worked at a healthcare application, our partners often asked for a list of our customers to market to. And we always said, “No, that’s not what we do.” Instead, we offered co-branded messages, sent on the partner’s behalf, but we never shared data despite ongoing requests. A marketer’s data is their gold, and trust with the customer is the most important thing you can have if you want to continue to grow.
What advice would you give to marketers who feel conflicted between getting results and their ethics?
This is the problem with business today. Everyone cares about the immediate metric — “This quarter, what have you done?” — when in reality, even the largest firms like Meta are declining in growth because people don’t trust them anymore. The same thing can be said for marketing. It’s hard to convince your boss that building trust and a long-term relationship with customers is worth slower but more reliable growth. You’re not going to win that argument in 80% of boardrooms; shareholder price is focused on what you did this quarter, not what you are building out for the next five years.
But if you look at the brands people trust — Apple, Google — even if they’ve stumbled along the way, Apple has always been strong with data protection and Google’s motto is “Do no evil.” Whereas with Facebook, you are the product.
If marketers think they have to be on Meta, maybe they can supplement that with other engaging platforms. Nowadays I learn almost everything on Youtube — and you can put great targeted ads there. You don’t need Meta; there are so many other avenues to reach customers.
Marketing is always going to be changing. It’s important for marketers to remember that customers aren’t dollar signs, they’re human beings. Treat them with the respect you’d want yourself. If you keep hammering that home, and if you have a set of ethics that you follow, you’ll do better. You won’t be perfect but you can strive to be incrementally better. And over time, you will beat out the brands that aren’t ethical. Plus, you’ll have a better long-term relationship with customers as a result.
