Every marketer is sure to have tracked data at some point in their professional career. Whether it is to examine customer behaviours or generate sales, tracking is a super useful tool for any business. Here, creative manager Emily Grimes explores one company who has changed the game and taken the marketing world by storm.
On Thursday 22nd April, a 29-year-old entrepreneur appeared on Dragon’s Den to pitch his start-up business. Four out of five dragons offered the full amount of asking money and equity, with one deeming it “the best pitch ever”. But what did Sam Jones, founder of Gener8, propose to the dragons?
Well, he asked a very simple question: why give your data to advertisers for free, when you could be earning from it?
Our data is being exploited every single day and, as marketers, we already know this. We click that cute little button that says ‘allow cookies’ on pretty much any website we go onto because we want to get rid of the pop-up and continue browsing.
It’s just a cookie, what harm could it do? Well actually, just one website visit will see potentially 25 different companies put trackers on you through third-party cookies.
Some of these companies will be data brokers, who will literally sell your data for profit.
Cookies don’t seem so cute anymore, do they?
Luckily for the public (unluckily for some marketers), Google is planning to phase out the third-party cookie on Chrome browsers by 2022.
Google noted that “users are demanding greater privacy--including transparency, choice, and control over how their data is used.”
Google is actually pretty late to the party as Firefox and Sarafi had already phased out the third-party cookie. However, Chrome takes up more than 56% of the web browser market and accounts for more than half of all global web traffic.
So actually, in the words of Ke$ha, “the party don’t start til’ ‘Google’ walks in”.
Sam Jones, who may or may not have seen (or attended) the third-party cookie’s leaving party, decided to see if there was a way people could make money from their own data, while also ensuring advertisers had access to said data.
The idea behind Gener8 is that it is ‘cookieless’. The user controls their own data and they will be rewarded any time their data is used online.
Users can choose their preferences based on what they’d like to see, then Gener8 will tailor all the adverts they see online.
Not only does this generate (ha ha) points that they can redeem for real-life vouchers and products, their personal data and browsing history is protected as they are assigned a random alphanumeric identifier.
So even though the death of the third-party cookie is imminent, as marketers we can actually use this platform to do what we’ve always done, track our target market using user-declared data (first party data).
When you group together cookieless browsing, data protection and money-earning on both customer and vendor sides, Gener8 is a recipe for success.
We predict that the majority of the UK will soon be using the Gener8 browser to do their every day tasks – and earn money from doing it.
Now is the time for marketers to be jumping on this bandwagon too, to prepare for the eventual phase out of the third-party cookie as well as get on board with a mutual benefit enterprise.
First-party data is the way forward and Gener8 is paving that way.
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