MMA suggests attribution workarounds amid GDPR, walled garden challenges

Brief:

Mobile marketers can use several workaround strategies to improve ad attribution and ROI as they face stricter rules on data sharing, per a press release by the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) shared with Mobile Marketer. The group aims to help mobile marketers whose ability to reach target audiences has been limited as digital platforms comply with the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and walled garden tighten control over data.
The MMA published a guide that lists data-sharing policies for many of the biggest digital media platforms and provides advice on building multi-touch attribution (MTA) models. One strategy the MMA recommends is for marketers to work with publishers that offer a "clean room" approach to merge their data with the publisher's, perform MTA analytics and extract findings.
The association also said marketers should use MTA providers whose data tagging systems are approved by major platforms, implement an ad server with unrestricted IDs and create an "uber-model" that combines data from disparate sources into a single view of media measurement. The MMA's Marketing Attribution Think Tank this week released the guide at its MATT Unplugged event in New York.

Insight:

The GDPR enacted last year has resulted in proposed fines and investigations of dozens of tech companies that gather data about consumers. So far, the fines have been limited, but that could be about to change as authorities gather evidence and establish legal grounds to penalize companies for alleged violations, The Wall Street Journal reported this week. The rules have perplexed users, companies and regulators, and have led to confusion about data sharing that underpins the media-buying efforts of mobile marketers.

"GDPR and data policies of some platforms shouldn't slow or stop marketers from creating robust attention models and leveraging MTA," Greg Stuart, CEO of the MMA, said in a statement. Consumer data is available and marketers can work with publishers to boost the productivity of their mobile campaigns, Stuart said. MTA practices can improve marketing ROI and help marketers integrate strategies such as A/B testing and marketing mix modeling, per the association.

The European Union is only one governing authority that is cracking down on data sharing. The California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018, which goes into effect in 2020, grants consumers the right to request the data that businesses collect on them and to ask businesses not to sell their data. The CCPA and other proposed legislation have left marketers scrambling to prepare for further data privacy regulations.

Meanwhile, Facebook faces a fine of as much as $5 billion for violating a data-privacy agreement with the Federal Trade Commission. While the FTC hasn't commented on potential fines, some U.S. lawmakers are urging the commission to hammer Facebook and its executives with longer-term penalties. Sens. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., and Josh Hawley, R-Mo., on Monday sent a letter to the FTC demanding that company leaders like CEO Mark Zuckerberg be held personally accountable if they knowingly violated the agreement or broke the law.