Marketing Attribution and Privacy Fundamentalism

The scientific mindset is crucial for anything to work, but I believe it should take a back seat in matters of marketing or law.

When in charge, engineers will only aspire to turn the marketing discipline into a science of predictable revenue, and CFOs will be naturally quick to embrace it at the expense of real value. This aberration brought us (Multi-Channel) Marketing Attribution.

When managed by engineers, privacy compliance becomes a radical, binary choice. Companies will either fully comply or deserve a bashing. This anomaly brought us Privacy Fundamentalism.

Funny enough, both are opposite sides of the same coin. Marketing Attribution is built on indiscriminate personal data collection. Privacy Fundamentalism is built on an intransigent approach to data ethics or the law.

For the most part, MarTech professionals are IT profiles supporting marketing operations, rather than “marketers”. For the most part, privacy engineers cannot think like lawyers. Different mindsets, all but interchangeable. Humanities and sciences. They must work together for good things to happen.

In an ideal world, marketing teams would dismiss individual profiling, and privacy professionals wouldn’t speak in absolute terms.