Permission Marketing

When it comes to the advertising world, data is key. First party data is the data of the individual, second party data is the publisher's data, and third-party data is the aggregated data.

Publishers are currently facing pending legislation around how they're allowed to utilize data and are receiving lower CPMs because good data is hard to get. The more data that's available about the audience, the higher the CPMs the publishers get. Facebook has been a key player in this movement by opening up its platform to allow people to bring data in instead of the other way around.

Brands on the other hand are uncomfortable advertising using data because they just don't know how it was collected. Lastly, consumers face a problem of transparency and lack the understanding of how their data is being used.

We can expect individuals' voluntarily selling of their data to publishers and advertisers as the real driver of growth in the ad space, because the information would be far richer and have a greater level of granularity than the kind that would be acquired from companies like BlueKai, eXelate, Rapleaf and Spokeo etc. The concept of permission marketing, coined in 1999 by the vanguard of modern marketing Seth Godin, cuts at the heart of the issue. It puts the consumer in ultimate control, empowering them and making them more comfortable in regards to sharing information thus feeding the cycle that benefits all.

Capturing the attention of the consumer is the main goal here: it's an important asset that has to be valued and should never be wasted. WIth consumers opting in to communicate, they are giving you the permission to educate them and to connect with them while respecting who they are. Once trust is established, the cost of dripping to people drops down tremendously.

This is the same trend we expect to gain traction on mobile. With users downloading hundreds of apps, the importance of retaining them increases significantly. iOS and Android platforms offer the ability for developers to get 'push permissions' - the ability to send push notifications. These can be in the form of basic pushes that appear on the screen of the smartphone as well as rich pushes which appear inside the application and can have rich media / interactive properties.