New data privacy regulations mean lots of changes – both big and small, for companies across industries. In this piece, Ben Fenster, Co-Founder and chief product officer, Anzu.io, talks to companies across industries about what it takes to pivot to meet new privacy regulations while maintaining relationships with customers and a solid sense of integrity.
Tru Optik Takes a Holistic Approach                 Â
The identity resolution leader across OTT, Connected TV, streaming audio and gaming, Tru Optik empowers media companies, publishers, and advertisers to target specific audiences efficiently at scale, as well as to measure and evaluate the performance of streaming media campaigns.
Collaboration Is the Name of the Game
In the wake of new data regulations such as GDPR and CCPA, Tru Optik and other data management platforms are faced with new challenges, as GDPR and CCPA have different requirements and standards. These regulations require all parties in the advertising ecosystem to take a much more proactive approach to ensuring the security and privacy expectations of consumers are met. This shift has created a new reality for companies working with user data, one that beckons the industry to work together, not apart.
Now is the time for companies to collaborate and support one another. Gone are the days of “I do my thing, you do yours†when it comes to data privacy. Companies must implement new systems in order to treat consumer data in a more secure and legally compliant way. These operation compliance requirements are complex but are well within the capabilities of the companies within the advertising technology ecosystem.
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The Balancing Act
As Tru Optik and Adtech companies implement these new systems to manage consumer data in a secure and legally compliant way, one challenge they face is balance — the ability to balance privacy with a precision-based approach to data management. This balance is achieved by implementing a well thought-out privacy and security compliance plan that enables customers to have the assurance that their data will be handled in a secure manner that is compliant with all applicable privacy laws and regulations accompanied by an effective notice and opt-out scheme.
This can be augmented with contractual requirements that provide comfort to the customer and its users.
“The point is that data is, and remains, in the hands of the users themselves. We let them decide if they want to share their data. Tru Optik has led the way in connected TV privacy compliance by enabling opt-out for publishers, agencies, and Adtech partners with our Privacy.TV solution,†said Jonathan Bokor, chief privacy and business affairs officer at Tru Optik.
Anzu.io Puts Privacy in the Users’ Hands
Anzu.io is a programmatic in-game advertising platform that seamlessly immerses non-intrusive ads into video games.
100% Consent – No Exceptions
One major change taking shape in today’s data privacy landscape is the wide scale adoption of the IAB Transparency and Consent Framework 2.0. Announced in August of 2019, the second iteration of this groundbreaking framework puts the power in the hands of the consumers, enabling them to choose which data, if any, they wish to share, and where. It also gives them full control over the processing–for example, they could say no geo-targeting.
Previous loopholes are falling by the wayside, including the notorious “legitimate interest†clause, which allowed companies to market similar messages and products to audiences that have already shown interest or benefit from the topic. In short, this loophole allowed marketers to advertise similar information to consumers without explicit consent. Such loopholes are earning a bad reputation and are being phased out as more advertisers and big brands are demanding 100% consent from their tech vendors.
Empowering Users
Companies like Anzu are evolving by developing new privacy management platforms, approved by IAB, that allow users to approve and manage privacy settings for each vendor. Anzu CPO Ben Fenster shares an example, “If we send an ad request for a user who did not agree to behavioral or personalized advertising, then I would only send him contextual advertising based on the content of the game — think ads for a sports drink inside a basketball game. I would not show him the same ad he saw on a website two days ago or send GPS location data. And if that same user gave consent a month ago and then retracted it, our platform needs to be on top of those updates and make adjustments accordingly.†Such measures, according to Fenster, are becoming the new industry standard, “complete privacy management platforms are no longer just nice to have. They are mandatory,†he said.
The Marriage of Privacy and Security
Another change on the horizon is the meeting of security and privacy. A company can’t claim to protect data if they have no way to secure it. In addition to 100% consent, top-tier gaming studios are now requiring the highest levels of security from the ground up–including building security, employee workstations, 3rd-party audits, and more. It’s clear that as advertising and Adtech evolve to meet the increasing demands of both consumers and publishers, privacy and security will continue to work hand-in-hand.
Learn More: Is the Future of Marketing Touchless?
Tripwire Game Studio Talks Transparency With Every Player
Tripwire Interactive is an entertainment software developer and publisher based in Roswell, Georgia, formed by members of the international team that created the Unreal Tournament 2004 mod Red Orchestra: Combined Arms.
Market Education
Tripwire, a popular game studio with titles such as Red Orchestra and Killing Floor, was not initially very interested in the slew of new data privacy regulations. “Our initial feeling was more about should we care about this stuff?’ But as we had begun to dig in on GDPR, as well as taking a sounding of players across the internet, we were a bit more aware of the feelings than some game publishers,†said Alan Wilson, vice president of Tripwire.
The studio had previously chosen to make their games’ end-user license agreementOpens a new window (EULA) both understandable and publicly available to read, a move which briefly led to a backlash as potential players realized what a “license†is and is not. “Soon, players became very supportive as they saw that we were taking things like cheating and grieving seriously,†Wilson said. “That made it clear to us that the whole data privacy movement is really about trust.â€
A Big Job That’s Worth it
Legislation like GDPR and CCPA, for all their obvious flaws, does reflect the public concern about what companies are doing with all this data they collect. It is a vast amount of data. “We have over 10 Bn analytic data records for our game KF2, which tells us every time a Bloat kills a player – and a thousand other things, too. So we started by highlighting how much data we collect, along with all the external places we hold data (AWS, Playfab, Bugsplat, Google Analytics, etc.) and quickly realized the scale of the task. It was a big exercise, resulting in a complex Privacy NoticeOpens a new window , which is a pain to maintain. But here’s the important bit: it is absolutely key to us that we can demonstrate our transparency to every potential player of our games. It is crucial to our way of doing business as a developer and perhaps even more as a publisher that the players (and other developers) feel they can trust completely. You can choose to ignore this stuff – but you can certainly expect people to wonder why!,†Wilson said.
Co-Contributors:
Jonathan Bokor, Chief Privacy & Business Affairs Officer, Tru Optik
Tru Optik audience-based targeting, campaign measurement and identity resolution powers the streaming media ecosystem. Tru Optik’s patented Household Graphâ„¢ of more than 80 million homes enables the world’s leading brands, agencies, media companies, and platforms to engage consumers across OTT, streaming audio, and gaming with unmatched scale, accuracy and privacy compliance.
Alan Wilson, Vice President, Tripwire
Based in Roswell, Georgia, Tripwire Interactive is an entertainment software developer and game publisher founded in 2005 by the award-winning mod team and winners of the 2004 edition of the “$1,000,000 Make Something Unreal†competition. Along with publishing Indie game titles, Tripwire Interactive continues to build a reputation for strong support for all their titles over a prolonged period of time. For more information visit Tripwire Interactive’s.