TMW #018 | Apple's privacy nutrition labels, Adobe and project management and the marketing promise of 5G

Welcome to The Martech Weekly, where every week I review some of the most interesting ideas, research, and latest news. I try to look to where the industry is going and make sense of it all.

👋 A Quick Note

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👨 The Movember Thread

I mentioned last week that I'm fundraising with The Lumery to raise $10,000 for Movember!  I'm committing to writing at least 200 words per day reflecting on marketing, technology and customer experience for the 30 days of November. This week I write about approaches to data analysis, customer experience, marketing strategy frameworks, how technology may be diminishing the role of the marketer, dealing with my first unsubscribe from this newsletter and the problem with customer journeys. Link

👌Top #3

🍎 Apple’s privacy nutrition labels. Apple is the single most important company in the world when it comes to how privacy is changing on the web. The past twelve months has seen the company shut down the many, many ways in which companies track users on their platforms. Let’s take a little look at Apple’s efforts to date including; removing the ability for 3rd party cookies to be tracked in Safari, restricting tracking features in-app, which spell certain doom for some companies, and limiting the feature set of Siri so that voice data cannot be stored or aggregated. Apple is definitely zigging when most other of the other big tech players such as Amazon and Google are zagging.

Now Apple is taking a proactive role in the digital life of consumers by slapping labels on apps in their store with "nutritional" details, informing users  of what data the app collects and how it uses this data. This is no doubt a bold move when it comes to educating the public about their data and privacy rights. What we’re seeing here is the future of the data economy; data will be closely linked to a person’s wellbeing, going so far as to parallel the warning labels we see on products in grocery store shelves. Link

💻 Adobe and project management. I remember a number of years ago reflecting with a colleague on why people in the creative department are so hard to manage. Maybe Adobe agrees. In a surprising move Adobe has acquired the marketing focused project management tool Workfront. According to Which-50, Workfront has about 3,000 customers globally, with many top companies using the product. But what makes this acquisition interesting is how Adobe is seemingly edging further to owning the entire marketing, creative and now operations ecosystem. Similar to the 2018 acquisition of Magento, Adobe is consolidating power to keep customers in the platform at all times.

Now there are some obvious benefits to this which makes sense, if Adobe can successfully integrate with marketing and creative cloud services it could be a great way to streamline a lot of collaboration natively. There is a growing emergence of cloud companies like Adobe edging towards capturing the mindshare of the marketer, by guiding strategy, creative and now how teams work together. But as it normally goes, an acquisition does not necessarily mean a seamless integration in platform, but what is certain is that Adobe is planning towards owning all the pieces on the Martech chessboard. Link

📱 The promise of 5G for marketers. 5G will soon change everything about how customers interact with brands.  This one is in the subscriber version of TMW. Sign up here to get a link to the full version.

📈Chart Of The Week

This week a look at how Apple’s education on data privacy and IDFA is leading to staggering numbers of tracking opt outs. Sign up here to get a link to the full version and the chart.

📚 Everything Else

What if we decentralise social media? As with how the internet first began with small chat rooms and forums, social media is now trending in that direction. With the increasing popularity of alternative social media like Parler (now 8 million users). Here’s an exploration of options for social media in the future. Link

Using 1st party data. About 58% of companies in APAC believe they don’t significantly use first party data. Here’s an argument for effectively using it. Link

The confusing role of a customer experience manager. Does a CX professional take care of the website, customer service or help manage the brand experience? The answer is no to either one of those and yes to all. A great read on defining a multivariate role. Link

Insta reading? In an effort to increase the relevancy of reading the New York Library is now scanning entire books that can be read in Instagram stories from start to finish. Link

Six alternatives to Google Analytics. A great little read on privacy focused web analytics platforms. Link

TikTok wants to know what is happening with the US ban. Hilarious move from TikTok in which they publicly went out and ask the Trump administration what is happening the proposed ban and sell off. It appears that the government has forgotten about it completely. Maybe this is what happens when policy is directed by the whims of a president’s social media preferences?   Link

Predictive customer profiling and B2B account marketing. It was announced this week that Terminus, an account marketing platform, has acquired GrowFlare which uses psychographics to create lookalikes and inform promising and high value accounts. Link

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