Outlaw! It’s the creative brainstorming game marketing communications companies often play to encourage participants to come up with ideas for new products and services, and ways to change the way their businesses work for the better. It simply asks the participants to come up with ideas and innovative answers to the question: “What would you do if they made what your company does illegal?”
From Apple’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) in Safari to Mozilla’s Enhanced Tracking Protection (ETP) in Firefox, cookies, the primary means through which marketers track consumers on the web, are under attack.
Ready or not, the cookie crackdown is in full effect. The cumulative effect of Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) on Safari, Enhanced Tracking Protection (ETP) on Firefox, and more granular third-party cookie blocking on Chrome are making measuring digital marketing activities increasingly difficult.
The digital ad industry is up in arms about a new Intelligent Tracking Prevention feature that is included in the latest version of Apple’s Safari browser.
The feature is now on millions of mobile and tablet devices as of the release of iOS 11 on Tuesday and will come to millions more later on September 25 with the release of macOS High Sierra.
The cookie law. Wasn’t that a car crash?
Ugly banners stuck on top of beautiful designs, obscuring functionality and doing nothing for anybody except forcing a pointless click to get it out the way and get busy living.
Whose fault was that?
Tags on your website help measure traffic and can assist in optimising your online marketing.
Tags are integral to most modern marketing tools, from web analytics to retargeting to ad serving to CRM.
Here we’ll be taking a beginner’s look at what tags are, what they do and how you can use tag management to make online marketing less arduous.
It’s now more than two years since the cookie law began to be ‘enforced’ in the UK, but has it changed anything?
In the run up to the May 2012 ‘deadline’ there was plenty of confusion from online businesses over the steps required to comply with the directive, thanks to some unclear instructions.
Now cookie notices are seen on most websites, though the ICO received just 38 ‘concerns’ about cookies on sites between April and June 2014.
So was it worth the effort? Are cookie notices just an irritant? Is it totally irrelevant given the activities of the NSA? Or has this law been useful in raising awareness of cookies?
In this post, I’ll be discussing cookies and the different options for tracking user behaviour and actions.
I will start with a summary of the humble cookie, its origin and then explore some of the different tracking types that it allows.
I’ll then look at the next generation consumer and cross device tracking opportunities to see how we could operate in a cookie free world.
I’ve been on record a number of times saying that I think the EC Directives relating to cookies are fundamentally flawed. We could make a parallel with the current UK/EU Euro ‘situation’ but let’s not go there. In the UK the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has a duty to enforce these directives and, as they say, “This isn’t going away. It’s the law.”
Yesterday the ICO released its updated guidance for UK website owners. You can download the PDF from the link in the news release.
Given the tough task of interpretation, guidance and enforcement that is the ICO’s duty, I have to say that I think this document is a valiant and comprehensive effort given the task and I’d commend them for this. I would urge you to read it for the full details. It is clearly written and quite practical.
Below are some of my initial thoughts on reading this latest guidance.