Personalization – Yay or nay?

At the BSI Customer Summit 2021, everything revolved around the topic of hyper-personalization. Together with proven experts, we searched for answers to the opportunities, risks and challenges associated with hyper-personalization. We have summarized three highlights for you here.

Ad blockers are the biggest mass protest the world has ever seen

In his presentation at the Customer Summit, Daniel Jörg, Practice Head Marketing Communications at Agentur Farner, questioned the obsession of many marketers with data and personalization. While these may be valuable for successful campaigns, he believes the marketing industry has often gone too far in the past with intrusive advertising and retargeting. For example, he sees the increasing use of ad blockers as a sign that many people feel bothered by online advertising.

In his opinion, strictly rational campaigns are usually the wrong way to get through to customers and get their attention. Rather, in addition to using data and personalization, he encourages marketers to rely on basic psychological principles, creativity, a willingness to experiment and holistic measurement concepts, an approach that makes it possible to design effective and efficient campaigns that move people and make CMOs happy.

In his presentation, Daniel Jörg explains what this might look like and what role behavioral design plays in it by using compelling cases:

The future of marketing is “cookieless”

In his presentation, Urs Blickenstorfer, Owner & CEO of IundF Marketing Technology, examined the technical side of personalization. He shared interesting insights into the history of tracking and made specific references to cookies.

According to Urs, cookies were originally developed for a better user experience, such as for auto logins, saving shopping carts etc. However, over time, they have been used increasingly for advertising purposes and have lost value for the consumer.
Consequently, privacy awareness, and corresponding regulations such as the GDPR put Internet browser providers under pressure to act. As a result, it has become more and more difficult for advertisers to use 3rd party cookies and the corresponding data.

Urs Blickenstorfer referred to the use of so-called first- or zero-party data as possible alternatives. In the following video, you can find out how companies can access such data and how to use it:

Personalization is the heart of marketing and is no longer conceivable without AI

At the Customer Summit AI roundtable, growth expert Sandro Meyer, media researcher Noemi Festic and in-house AI expert Christoph Bräunlich discussed the opportunities and risks of hyper-personalization with Charlotte Malz, Communications Manager at BSI.

Most of the attendees of the BSI Customer Summit answered Charlotte Malz’s question if hyper-personalization divides people and prevents accidental discoveries with “No”, while our roundtable guests had more nuanced answers.

Noemi Festic saw no empirical evidence so far that hyper-personalization leads to such a division. She said that people could also protect themselves consciously against algorithms. Sandro Meyer agreed but saw a need for more transparent, comprehensible algorithms. AI expert Christoph Bräunlich, on the other hand, recognized some dangers and emphasized that it is ultimately up to us humans to use algorithms responsibly.

Do algorithms know better what we want than we do? Is personalization really the magic bullet in marketing that leads to better products?

Watch the following video to find our roundtable participants’ answers to this questions and other exciting questions in the context of (hyper-)personalization::