Editor’s Note: New data platforms with AI capabilities are promising a greater ability to profile, segment and identify similar audiences for target marketing purposes. However, the use of AI has created concerns around compliance risk and data privacy. A column in CM sister pub AdExchanger from Lucas Long, Head of Global Privacy Strategy at InfoTrust, explores how marketers can continue to behave ethically amid evolving privacy regulations and an influx of new AI-assisted platforms.
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Doing more with less is the name of the advertising game these days. Strict compliance and privacy laws combined with ever-changing technical restrictions limit the data companies can collect and process for marketing and advertising.
This isn’t a bad thing. Respecting customer privacy is good business, especially as younger generations take action to protect themselves. But it doesn’t make an advertiser’s job easier.
Artificial intelligence can help to fill the gaps. Platforms are introducing AI capabilities that promise greater utility with less data through features like user profiling and segmentation, identification of similar audiences for targeting, bid optimization and automated creative optimization. AI for marketing and advertising technologies is meant to help advance use cases by making connections within a data set that would be difficult or time-consuming for humans to spot on their own.
As AI eases one process, however, it creates new concerns around compliance risk and data privacy. And with more regulations like California’s recently passed AI safety bill surely coming soon, marketers need to stay on top of their ethics game.
Understanding regulations
AI systems, by their nature, are profiling consumers and conducting automated decision-making with consumer data. Consumers have the right to protect that data. Therefore, when implementing AI for marketing and advertising, companies have to consider the current privacy laws, even as regulators work to craft new AI-specific regulations, such as the recently published EU AI Act.
AI requires data to train and execute, but just because you have the data on hand doesn’t mean it’s compliant or ethical to use it for all applications. We have to consider if the purposes disclosed to consumers when the data was initially collected are sufficient to cover the use cases for which AI is being applied today.
For the full article, head over to AdExchanger.
