Companies often focus on avoiding fines by being overly cautious with data, a practice called "under-permissioning." This creates a huge opportunity cost by shrinking the marketable audience and leading to wasted ad spend on generalized campaigns.
To succeed, marketers must stop passively accepting the data they're given. Instead, they must proactively partner with IT and privacy teams to advocate for the specific data collection and governance required to power their growth and personalization initiatives.
As AI personalization grows, user consent will evolve beyond cookies. A key future control will be the "do not train" option, letting users opt out of their data being used to train AI models, presenting a new technical and ethical challenge for brands.
To earn consumer data, brands must offer a clear value exchange beyond vague promises of "better experiences." The most compelling benefits are tangible utilities like time savings and seamless cross-device continuity, which are often undervalued by marketers.
While the industry chases complex AI, research shows less than half of marketers (42%) use basic preference data for personalization. This highlights a massive, untapped opportunity to improve customer experience with existing data before investing in advanced technology.