4 ms·

The Sephora case: Do not sell – But are you selling?

28 points by WaitWaitWha 4y ago

bruce511 4y ago
This is interesting because it shows that you can "sell" customer information, without receiving money. In this case they were selling data by using external analytics (presumably Google) which provided them value from analysing said analytics. Provide something, get something, even if the get something is just a repackage of your something. This will have substantial effects on anyone using external analytics, where the host of said analytics can (does?) your data for other things. I expect this will be a boon for those providing self-hosted analytics products. We are living in this weird space - advertising pays for big (useful) properties like Google, YouTube and Facebook. The ability to do hyper-focused advertising is effecient and effective for small businesses. And yet (not surprisingly) people are pushing back against the data collection that makes this happen. It's one of those cases I think where both sides are being completely reasonable, and have a strong case. I fear unknown outcomes so I'm against data collection, but at the same time I want free search and YouTube. [1] this is distinct from the "sites have too many adverts" issue, lots of sites have too many, lots have the right number.
- pjc50 4y ago
  > The ability to do hyper-focused advertising is effecient and effective for small businesses I think this is not as guaranteed as the advertising companies make out, while being considerably more expensive both for the advertisers and the privacy of users. Would numbers really be that much worse if ads were micro targeted against the content rather than the customer. You'd want to retain location targeting, but that can be ephemeral - you only need to know that the page is being served to an IP in a particular region, not the home of a particular user.
  - bruce511 4y ago
    I think, as with all marketing, it's good to monitor value-for-money and to figure out what style of marketing works best for your product. So yeah, I think hyper-focused is good, but more general is good as well. As to which one works best, and whether A will deliver more than B - well that unfortunately has been the holy grail marketeers have been searching for forever. Ultimately some things are really hard to measure, and sometimes it's hard to know if something else would be better.
seszett 4y ago
> With European privacy regulators laser-focused on Silicon Valley, the California regulator picked a case against Champs-Elysées. To be honest, Sephora has already been fined for GDPR violations in Europe as well. It just happens that the largest violators are generally US-based because most of the large companies handling user data are US-based, but most of the smaller GDPR cases have been against EU companies.

28 points by WaitWaitWha 4y ago

This is interesting because it shows that you can "sell" customer information, without receiving money. In this case they were selling data by using external analytics (presumably Google) which provided them value from analysing said analytics. Provide something, get something, even if the get something is just a repackage of your something. This will have substantial effects on anyone using external analytics, where the host of said analytics can (does?) your data for other things. I expect this will be a boon for those providing self-hosted analytics products. We are living in this weird space - advertising pays for big (useful) properties like Google, YouTube and Facebook. The ability to do hyper-focused advertising is effecient and effective for small businesses. And yet (not surprisingly) people are pushing back against the data collection that makes this happen. It's one of those cases I think where both sides are being completely reasonable, and have a strong case. I fear unknown outcomes so I'm against data collection, but at the same time I want free search and YouTube. [1] this is distinct from the "sites have too many adverts" issue, lots of sites have too many, lots have the right number.

pjc50 4y ago
> The ability to do hyper-focused advertising is effecient and effective for small businesses I think this is not as guaranteed as the advertising companies make out, while being considerably more expensive both for the advertisers and the privacy of users. Would numbers really be that much worse if ads were micro targeted against the content rather than the customer. You'd want to retain location targeting, but that can be ephemeral - you only need to know that the page is being served to an IP in a particular region, not the home of a particular user.
- bruce511 4y ago
  I think, as with all marketing, it's good to monitor value-for-money and to figure out what style of marketing works best for your product. So yeah, I think hyper-focused is good, but more general is good as well. As to which one works best, and whether A will deliver more than B - well that unfortunately has been the holy grail marketeers have been searching for forever. Ultimately some things are really hard to measure, and sometimes it's hard to know if something else would be better.

seszett 4y ago

> With European privacy regulators laser-focused on Silicon Valley, the California regulator picked a case against Champs-Elysées. To be honest, Sephora has already been fined for GDPR violations in Europe as well. It just happens that the largest violators are generally US-based because most of the large companies handling user data are US-based, but most of the smaller GDPR cases have been against EU companies.