Personalization and privacy aren’t mutually exclusive: Tuesday’s daily brief

MarTech’s daily brief features daily insights, news, tips, and essential bits of wisdom for today’s digital marketing leader. If you would like to read this before the rest of the internet does, sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox daily.

Good morning, Marketers, and stay indoors!

The social impact story from Outfront below reminds me that I visited their offices in downtown Manhattan immediately before the big lockdown. I was talking to them about some innovative features they were planning to launch, initially for their network of digital billboards in the transit system.

That’s a story that didn’t get told because plans were suspended when transit usage went to little more than zero overnight. Outfront, of course, delivers ads to an enormous outdoor audience – an audience which must have shrunk considerably during 2020. But we’re back outdoors at last, certainly here in New York.

Except perhaps for this week. Have you been out there? Too much summer, and I can’t even imagine what it’s like in Phoenix, Las Vegas and even Seattle. Stay cool!

Kim Davis

Editorial Director

Why your agile marketing team should be sticky  

Teams that stick together like glue have a huge advantage in how well they perform. It’s not about what work they do or the skills they have that give them the awesome sauce—it’s about how they learn to work together over time. Most marketing departments assign “resources” to a project, then disband the project team when the project gets completed. When this happens, teams may start to form, but before they ever get to performing, we disband them.

In agile marketing, the model needs to be flipped. Teams that stick together get more work done, period. They develop their own efficiencies and understand each other’s strengths and weaknesses and can compensate accordingly. Speed comes to the team because they know the work and they know each other.

The ideal team size is four to six people, but absolutely no more than 10. The small team is able to get to performing a lot quicker than a large team just because there are fewer communication hoops to jump through, and a small group just gets more done than a large group.

A common solution to getting more work done is to put more people on the team. However, there’s an interruption that happens when we do that and it throws off the current team dynamic, so unless it’s to solve a long-term problem, throwing more people on a project won’t make it get done faster.

Read more here.

Outfront highlights food insecurity  

Physical and digital out-of-home advertising company Outfront Media has launched a campaign to highlight food insecurity. The campaign is a partnership with The Farmlink Project, formed at the start of the pandemic to connect unused farm produce with food banks nationwide.

Direct messages like “One-third of all food is wasted” are on display in New York, Los Angeles, Dallas and Houston. The initiative follows Outfront polling its employees on the causes that meant the most to them: racial and social injustice and food insecurity topped the list.

Why we care. We care about hunger and especially child hunger, something significantly worsened by the pandemic. We also care about companies that have a considered and year-round plan to highlight important social issues. Back in February, Outfront highlighted Black history makers for Black History Month. We’re looking forward to seeing what it presents next to its enormous outdoor audience.

Announcing the Search Engine Land Mentorship Program for SEO and PPC  

We’re excited to see our colleagues at Search Engine Land launch the Search Engine Land Mentorship Program, in partnership with SEO mainstay Eric Enge (who will mentor one lucky applicant, too). Inspired by other successful programs in the space (big shoutout to Women in Tech SEO), this Mentorship Program is open to applicants in both SEO and PPC.

Along with the opportunity to be mentored by experts in SEO and PPC, mentees will receive tickets to attend SMX Next. And mentors will be able to join in a panel discussion at the event on how to be a coach/mentor in search marketing.

More details and how to apply here.

Consumers and marketers think privacy and personalization aren’t mutually exclusive

Some 82% of Millennials and Gen Z consumers say privacy is a right, not a privilege, according to Facebook’s “Industry Perspective: The Evolving Customer Experience” report. In the U.S., 44% of consumers say they’re more likely to buy from businesses that offer personalized recommendations. Are these contradictory notions? Nearly three-quarters of U.S. marketers don’t think so — 74% agreed that relevant personalization and user privacy protection are not mutually exclusive.

Why we care. Sure, Google has delayed blocking third-party cookies in Chrome until 2023, but the growing emphasis on consumer privacy may mean that your marketing strategy should incorporate other ways, like first-party data or contextual ads, to reach your target audience. Customers want the best of both worlds — privacy and personalization — and the brands that can deliver both stand to gain.