Marketers and advertisers are facing choppy waters at the confluence of two powerful currents: a vigorous new era of consumer data privacy, rolling into “data-driven everything” practices like personalization and programmatic advertising — both now turbo-charged by artificial intelligence and machine learning.

According to the Real Story Group’s Sarah Brown, the increasing pace of privacy legislation, privacy-protecting tools and advocacy, and the market-shaking actions by Apple and Google to limit cross-device and cross-site tracking have left all parties scrambling for secure footing. Vendors vie for position with new and updated solutions and alliances in a race for adoption — even as the course continues to shift.

With everything in flux, as a marketing leader you might be tempted to crawl under your desk and wait for the dust to settle. Where to begin? Indeed, how to begin when everything is so fluid?

When faced with a chaotic and unsettled situation, a good place to start is with an organizing framework to categorize and understand the issues, dynamics, challenges, and opportunities in such a way that you can take action.

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Consumer intelligence company Talkwalker has acquired review management platform Reviewbox, expanding its capabilities to integrate e-commerce and user-generated content data with its extensive customer insights offerings. The company serves over 2,500 brands, including Delta and Whirlpool.

A key addition to Talkwalker’s social and customer data is Reviewbox’s product data, which is gathered from sites like Amazon, Walmart and eBay. As we’ve recently found, user-generated content and product reviews are up since the start of the pandemic and a key source of insights and exposure for many brands.

“Reviews give you an understanding of just what your customers think of your products, whether that’s good or bad,” newly hired CEO Tod Nielsen said in a statement. “This integration gives you a real-time view of this data, enabling you to react, and also helping you shape your products for the future.”

Why we care. For marketers, the increasingly fragmented media landscape requires a great deal of data gathering across all digital channels. This deal combines two key areas for brand safety, marketing intelligence and customer insights: social media and product reviews. This becomes even more critical with e-commerce’s rise

Customers are going to post about your company where they are, not in a place that’s necessarily most convenient for the brand. These customers who are thinking about your brand and sharing their experiences are highly engaged and worth your attention. If a marketing team isn’t using a platform to bring together all of this data at scale, they are leaving behind insights, and, ultimately, potential sales.

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Identity resolution – the science of connecting the growing volume of consumer identifiers to one individual as he or she interacts across channels and devices – has become critical to marketing success, as well as essential for compliance with consumer privacy laws. This guide from MarTech explains the benefits of identity resolution software, and examines the market, latest trends, opportunities and challenges. It also includes profiles of 10 leading identity resolution platform vendors, pricing information, capabilities comparisons and recommended steps for evaluating and purchasing.

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Google has essentially said that SEOs (or those attempting SEO) have not always used page titles how they should be for a while (since 2012). “Title tags can sometimes be very long or ‘stuffed’ with keywords because creators mistakenly think adding a bunch of words will increase the chances that a page will rank better,” according to the Search Central blog. Or, in the opposite case, the title tag hasn’t been optimized at all: “Home pages might simply be called ‘Home’. In other cases, all pages in a site might be called ‘Untitled’ or simply have the name of the site.” And so the change is “designed to produce more readable and accessible titles for pages.”

This title tag system change seems to be another one of those that maybe worked fine in a lab, but is not performing well in the wild. The intention was to help searchers better understand what a page or site is about from the title, but many examples we’ve seen have shown the exact opposite.

The power dynamic is heavily weighted to Google’s side, and they know it. But the key is to remember that we’re not completely powerless in this relationship. Google’s search engine, as a business, relies on us (in both SEO and PPC) participating in its business model.

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“Marketers, you’re shooting yourselves in the foot by keeping your brand and demand gen teams so separate all the time. They might be different functions in your eyes, but it’s absolutely critical that they’re integrated and balanced.” Amber Naslund, author, former SVP of Marketing for Sysomos