TMT Bites recently interviewed Andrea d’Agostino (LL.M. and Head of Data Protection & New Technologies at Mondadori Group) on the future of digital advertising in the GDPR era and how key players are using “new technologies” in “old channels”.

How can digital advertising players continue growing in the GDPR era?

“Further to the implementation of General Data Protection Regulation(GDPR), the digital advertising industry has been involved in a new great challenge: digital advertising players have a serious crush on marketing and advertising tech. The most easily sellable and superficially understandable part of the tech is “data”.

People generally recognize that everything they do online is being tracked. This belief has become real, especially in light of the leaked revelations from former NSA agent Edwards Snowden.

For digital advertising players, the data being collected in such vast amounts can help them reach their ultimate business communications goals. Every digital channel can be an easy way to reach the right person, in the right place, at the right time, with the right message. The new keyword for digital advertisers is “right”, everything should be “right”. How exciting is it that instead of traditional mass media thinking, where the message is being shouted out to as many people as possible (fingers crossed that some of them get engaged!), you can now hand-pick the perfect people to reach and show them a customized message. Truly, it is a marketing daydream. However, that comes with a dark cloud above it, which is the infringement of personal privacy. In this scenario, I think that targeting and re-targeting activities are seriously helping the digital advertising market to make the leap to a classic mass-media communication channel like the TV market.”

You are talking about targeting and re-targeting activities, how do you think that these may help the digital advertising market to increase its value?

“I think that sophisticated profiling activity is the secret of modern advertising. Pursuant to GDPR, profiling activity means “any form of automated processing of personal data consisting of the use of personal data to evaluate certain personal aspects relating to a natural person, in particular to analyze or predict aspects concerning that natural person's performance at work, economic situation, health, personal preferences, interests, reliability, behavior, location or movements”. This implies a different and more specific evaluation of data from simple “segmentation”. Indeed, the European Data Protection Board has always stated that the simple classification of data by filtering gender, location, age is not enough to consider this classification as profiling. In order to talk about profiling, we need to move forward and analyze the automated processing of personal data.

The automation of data processing allows data controllers to evaluate in more depth the collected personal data by crossing and matching many pieces of information that help to define the data subject profile. This profiling activity is very helpful for any marketer to address and customize the “right” campaign to the “right” people; this is the secret of a targeted marketing campaign. This type of marketing campaign identifies an audience likely to buy services or products and promotes those services or products to them. Once these key groups are recognized, companies develop marketing campaigns and specific products for those preferred market segments.

The GDPR recognizes that the future of marketing cannot be imagined without profiling and, in this respect, European data protection legislation provides that any company that is interested in addressing a targeted marketing campaign to data subjects cannot process their personal data without their consent. The legislation identifies consent as the legal basis for such an “invasive” activity. In digital marketing, there are many technologies that collect and process personal data and track user activities, such as cookies, sdk, pixel tags. It means that everyone entitled to process personal data arising from such sources may create customized and targeted marketing campaigns by following their target users everywhere on the web and mobile market.

Many people are asking if this is applicable to the TV market? I think yes, and I believe that all progress made in the digital advertising market during recent decades now may be extended to a “classical” mass market such as the television.”

How do you think that the TV market will change and how will it move from a typical mass market to an addressed market?

“TV has been the dominant mass advertising medium in recent decades. The mass market nature of TV is a function of two key factors: who is selling advertising and how the audience is measured. Each player in this market has its own ad sales force whose job is to convince advertisers that their network’s content does the best job of attracting the most desired audiences. In this way, advertising has been sold on the basis of programming packages to advertisers, and the dominant factor for selling activity has been the network program plans and distribution. While media players use their own internal data sets to try to improve the selection of audiences for the advertisers they represent, transactions between buyers and sellers remain based upon broad demographic currencies.

During the last 10 years, TV market players have started using Big Data, enabling advertisers to better match targeted segments to viewing audiences. Such uses may be called “addressable TV”, i.e., a method to deliver targeted advertising on digital TVs. Personalized advertisements can be delivered in real time based on the household composition, by means of a combination of audience analysis/clustering and delivery technologies. Traditional TV has always used GRP (Gross Rating Point) to measure the pressure of advertising campaigns on their target groups, usually relying upon estimates derived from audience share data combined with audience profiling data coming from consumer surveys.

Now addressable TV advertisements change the mass TV model in two ways. First, instead of buying the total audience of a network programs, advertisers purchase advertising on an individual household or internet-enabled device level. This is possible by using targeting activities on the addressable TV, including data matching activity, with additional internet-enabled devices. This means that users in one household may see different advertising content than users in another household watching the same TV program, and creates an opportunity for more precise targeting. This allows the advertisers to reach the “right” people, personalizing aspects of the creative advertising messages by using a TV device. Addressable advertising involves tracking users to target ads based on the user’s preferences and implies the use of Big Data to determine the most appropriate audiences for the advertiser’s messages. Starting from a low addressable level, TV advertisers may use different channels in order to increase the addressable level on the TV market and reach out to more “right” people on the basis of their preferences, likes, and location.

It is possible by matching more and more data from different devices used by the same user, for example laptops, notebooks, smartphones, tablets. The key factor is the IP address. Data matching used for addressable TV is based on the assumption that a smartphone and a smart TV connected to the same Internet line, with the same IP address, are owned by the same user.

This technique may be the perfect way to use Big Data in the TV market, but one cannot forget to respect applicable laws such as the GDPR in Europe. Such activity may be carried out on the basis of user consent, even if some players are approaching it via a risk-based method concerning legitimate interest. Both consent and legitimate interest are a legal basis to process personal data under GDPR and each data controller may determine its own guidelines to be followed in its data processing activities. This is the spirit of the GDPR: the accountability principle. The specific data processing activity used by addressable TV concerns profiling, localization and marketing activities. Such activities, in the common opinion and experience, should be based on the user’s consent as a legal basis.

It’s difficult to imagine how we may process users’ personal data for this purpose, without their consent, by basing it on the advertisers’ legitimate interest. In this respect, the right solution may be, as stated by many European data protection authorities, to apply to addressable TV devices the current legislation on cookies and data matching activities for Internet devices. It will be not so easy to have European legislation adequate to the digital revolution, but GDPR, and e-GDPR soon, provide principles that help digital market players to balance all interests at stake and adopt correct solutions.”

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