What is all the talk about Permission Marketing?
Is it really the future of online advertising?
In pure advertising-speak …. the advertising world ties itself up with stressing about things called ‘behavioural targeting models’. But they now appear to be facing a backlash when it comes to the privacy lobby, made up of public interest groups. Fearful of damaging relationships with their readers, many publishers are removing third-party widgets and other technologies when those technologies are found to capture and sell user data without the user’s express permission.
Even Facebook itself has cracked down on unauthorised ‘data scraping’ (ouch, that sounds nasty). It could be that consumers completely block any sort of data sharing, and that’s not good news for those advertisers and their targeting models.
But consumer want to buy things. They always will. But as the best salespeople will tell you, the true skill in selling is to let the customer believe they chose to buy, not to believe they were ‘sold to’ by a trained, skilled salesperson. That independence of thought remains crucial.
Also, consumers don’t want to be constantly bombarded with ‘junk’ advertising.
So, there’s a quandary for both parties. How to get round this with a win-win solution?
So the future for marketers will see them take the higher ground and this is where Permission Marketing comes into play.
The concept of “Permission Marketing” isn’t new; in fact, Seth Godin’s 1999 book about “turning strangers into friends and friends into customers” seems remarkably relevant in today’s age of “Friending,” “Liking,” and “Following.” Seth Godin told the (then e-mail-dominated) interactive industry, “By talking only to volunteers, Permission Marketing guarantees that consumers pay more attention to the marketing message. It serves both customers and marketers in a symbiotic exchange.”
Today, technologies like Facebook Connect and OAuth are helping to redefine the concept of permission marketing. Using these technologies, brands, retailers, publishers and other sites are able to actively establish a permission-based relationship with their users and customers on their own websites. Now websites have the opportunity to embrace transparency, to be upfront with people during the registration process about how their data will be used, as well as how it will benefit both parties.
We have a new generation comfortable using Facebook and other mobile apps and who, according to recent survey data, are quite willing to share personal information with companies and brands in exchange for value provided. They are also relatively unconcerned about the security of data they share on social networks. The bottom line is that this type of authorisation-based relationship between brand and user is likely to become the norm.
Sites and brands need to ask themselves: What am I offering people that they will truly value in exchange for permission to talk to them as a friend and not an anonymous user?
It is inevitable that a permission-based model will prevail, and those that are able to rapidly embrace this model and experiment with its possibilities will win a more loyal audience.
Posted on February 6, 2011
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