Big data has sent marketers scurrying for quick answers to map the customer journey and serve up hyper-personalized experiences to prove their relevance to consumers. No question, data is arguably this decade’s most important gift to marketers.
In this webinar, VB analyst Andrew Jones will be revealing important findings from our latest report on Identity and Marketing including the many types of ID markers that can be collected, VB’s best bets for data collection and aggregation tools, and the best way to bring it all together.
However, not so fast on the identity charge, say some, including Zouhair Belkoura, who will be contributing a valuable perspective to our panel discussion. As CEO of KeepSafe, a service that lets you store all your important digital files securely (think of it as a fortress-like digital locker), Belkoura is very attuned to privacy and empowering individuals to be in control of what they share with whom.
“If you think of the industry as a whole, you’ll see that the requirements for anonymity and privacy are somewhat relaxed,” said Belkoura. “But at which point to you cross the line from trying to gather information that is useful to becoming creepy?”
For Belkoura, the creep-line is crossed when you decouple anonymity from a rich profile — and, in fact, he believes it’s outright dangerous. “I think the dilemma in creating these profiles is on two levels. First, when you don’t secure your data enough so that you may have breaches on your back end, that’s one of the biggest risks. The second is when you use the information in a way that exposes to the customer in a very apparent way that you’re violating a social norm — aka you become creepy.”
KeepSafe is very intent on personalizing their experience for users, but collects the absolute minimum about who the customer is, and instead focuses on what the customer does.
Don’t miss out!
“We don’t actually know anything about you, so we’ve designed the product in such a way that if you haven’t discovered some of the very rich features in KeepSafe, you’ll learn about them,” said Belkoura. “If we realize after three months of using KeepSafe, that there are certain things that you’ve never actually touched, we may notify you in the user interface: ‘Hey, did you know there’s this, that, and the other thing that can enhance your experience?'”
On the other hand, Belkoura sees tremendous power in profiles and identity — when the consumer chooses to share that information. He distinguishes this from what he calls ‘behind-the-scenes profile generation,” when companies intent on hyper-targeting collect data and aggregate that information into an identity profile to tailor ads.
“The dangerous part is when you have this data craze and you collect all this information about the customer who never wanted to explicitly give it up,” asserted Belkoura. But he is quick to compare this to an instance like Instagram or Snapchat, where users will choose to follow certain accounts, including certain brands, and then the platform can show the user content that is more tailored to their interests, including ads that they’ll be more interested in.
“Personalization is fantastic if you get this information from the consumer voluntarily — but that’s very, very different from this behind-the-scenes profile generation.”
In fact, he sees the success of his company as a cautionary note to others. “From our perspective, it’s important for fellow startups and companies to know that consumers do really care about their privacy, so the most important thing is to respect that — and take the popularity of services like ours as a signal not to mess with it too much.”
Join us for what will undoubtedly be an illuminating discussion on what successful companies are doing around identity unification, the best tech platforms to do it, and consumers’ need for their privacy that can’t be ignored.
In this webinar, you’ll learn:
- Why customer identity is more critical than ever
- The challenges of collecting and unifying customer data
- Key tools for capturing customer data
- Best options for enriching existing customer profiles
- Methods and technologies to unify customer data
Speakers:
Andrew Jones, Insight Analyst, VentureBeat
Shawn Burns, Senior Vice President, Web and Digital Marketing, Schneider Electric
Scott Kabat, CMO, Prezi
Zouhair Belkoura, CEO, KeepSafe
This webinar is sponsored by Janrain. All research presented was done in advance and entirely independent of any sponsor.
