TMW #182 | Wednesday Martech Briefing

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Behavioral advertising is misunderstood, the Privacy Quicksand-box, platform-agnostic AI

Here’s the week in Martech: 

• Behavioral advertising is misunderstood: APRA takes a wrong turn.
• The Privacy Quicksand-box: More bad news for Google’s cookie-replacement tech.
• Platform-agnostic AI: Using AI to optimize ads across platforms.
• Everything else: Assistive customer service AI, hybrid CDPs, breaking language barriers, why media mix models fail, and more.

 👇 Here’s everything you’ve missed in marketing and tech this week.

📰 Latest Developments

Behavioral advertising is misunderstood. Just when you think politicians get it, they go and prove you wrong. In April, a bipartisan group of US lawmakers introduced the American Privacy Rights Act (APRA): Reasonable draft legislation that moves towards a consolidated, GDPR-like national privacy regulation. Last week, they undid a lot of their good work by revising the bill to prohibit companies from serving behaviorally-targeted ads altogether. Given that the bill’s original wording suggested that opt-in consent would be sufficient for behavioral advertising, this revision has mobilized marketers against the bill to the point that a planned markup session was canceled at the last minute as lawmakers grappled with the pushback. Yes, this is partly about out-of-touch politicians, but more broadly, it underscores that behaviorally-personalized advertising is misunderstood outside of the marketing industry. By proposing a total ban, lawmakers are suggesting that behavioral advertising is always a bad thing. This completely misses the fact that targeted advertising helps brands spend less to reach the right customers, and helps customers find relevant brands and avoid irrelevant ones. The spirit of the GDPR suggests that consumers are fine with personalized advertising; what they really want is transparency and control over who can serve behaviorally-targeted ads, and which personal data they are based on. Hopefully US lawmakers realize this before APRA is signed into law. Behavioral ads ban | Cancelled markup session

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Stay Curious,

Keanu Taylor

Make sense of marketing technology.

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Want to share something interesting or be featured in The Martech Weekly? Drop me a line at juan@themartechweekly.com.