‘Pseudonymisation’: The new revolution in consumer data

Brands will soon be able to target consumers while still respecting their privacy, writes Videology’s Jon Block. It’s time to start selling the benefits to the public.

Some of us are old enough to remember Minority Report. A film set in the year 2054, where John Anderton, played by Tom Cruise, is served with truly personalised ads based on iris recognition technology.

“John Anderton! You could use a Guinness right about now,” said the billboard as he fled for his life. It showcased a future with relevant and personalised targeting at its finest – but no safeguards for privacy.

While it’s superficially appealing to advertisers, it’s also quite disconcerting for the consumer. Even without iris scanners, consumers have deep concerns about today’s technology and online privacy. They worry about the loss of control over one’s personal data online, building pressure for greater protection.

European consumers are about to benefit from new rules designed to stop the Minority Report-style targeting. The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into effect in May 2018 and introduces a new concept – ‘pseudonymisation’ of personal data.

What this means is that brands can identify individuals but in return they need to take steps to ensure their true identify remains confidential. Pseudonymisation effectively replaces identifying personal details – such as a name – with another, encrypted or hashed identifier. For example, an online retailer would pseudonymise ‘John Anderton purchased a Guinness’ to ‘Visitor 36454 purchased a Guinness.’

The protection for consumers is that personal data is processed in such a way that the data can no longer be attributed to an individual without additional information, which has to be kept separately and securely. A giant data hack will no longer expose their data to public scrutiny because there will be no way to identify them.

The new rules will also force brands to address the issue of data privacy at the development stage of a product, rather than as an after-thought.

The benefit for brands is that they will continue to be able to identify individuals. That means advertising can still be targeted and the data keeps its premium value. This is vital because in today’s fragmented media world, caused by the proliferation of devices and platforms used by consumers to access content, data is what enables advertisers to understand the behaviour of their consumers across the different screens.

Such data is the glue that will allow advertisers to piece the fragments back together, creating a single customer profile across a multi-screen environment. The end result is better, more effective messages targeted at relevant consumers irrespective of where they may be in the purchase funnel.

If the EU rules had only allowed advertisers and publishers to anonymised data to run campaigns and monetize inventory, then publishers would have no way of identifying whether user Y is a new or recurring user and thus would not be able to report on unique visitors to their sites.

Controlling user exposure to advertising would prove impossible, especially cross-device, as would implementing intelligent targeting and re-targeting strategies. As a result, advertisers would have very limited insight into the effectiveness of their advertising efforts and wastage would be unavoidable. Publishers would also experience a negative impact.

With little means to monetise the value of the audiences they attract, publishers will struggle to fund the creation of quality content, something that in turn will also negatively affect the consumer.

So while this is good news for both advertisers and consumers, the difficulty is that consumers will see little change on screen.

Next time they look at a clothing website they will still potentially be chased round the web by ads, next time they check out a used car they will still potentially be driven mad with motoring messages. This happens much less in video, of course, simply because there is much less value in this type of strategy.

What pseudonymisation does deliver is the security of knowing that whatever brands know about their identity will be protected. It also allows targeting to ensure they see relevant messages, avoiding the scenario of a male consumer being shown a pregnancy ad, for example or a consumer seeing the same cereal ad 20 times in one month due to inability to control exposure and frequency.

These benefits represent a complex message in an environment where many consumers don’t recognise the value exchange between content and advertising and many are happy to use ad blockers.

The consumer education process needs to start now.

Jon Block is EMEA VP of Product and Platform at Videology