So what are the implications for marketers and advertisers in Japan with regard to privacy and user data?
There’s no two ways around it: We will have to work with less data about our customers than we do now, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Let’s be fair, some of the data that some companies gather is widely considered by consumers and privacy advocates to be excessive and overly intrusive.
Digital marketing will still be data-driven, but first-party data (1st party data) will be the gold standard when it comes to analytics. In other words, while the skills relating to data analysis that many modern, digital marketers possess are still at the heart of digital marketing, there will be a strong need to draw on fundamental marketing skills and strategy, which have somewhat fallen out of fashion, in favor of tactics, over the past 15 to 20 years.
While it won’t be a return to an earlier era of marketing and advertising in the style of Mad Men, it is a going to be a notable change in trajectory from where we were heading.
Additionally, the absence of third-party cookies will drastically weaken many of the current offerings from the ad tech industry, until some sort of alternative is found. However, with increased scrutiny on privacy and beliefs on privacy, it may not be anywhere near what is being utilized now.
The end result will see a more complex landscape for advertisers and marketers in Japan on the one hand, while creating new opportunities for businesses that will step in to fill the vacuum left behind from having less data. Both Google and Facebook (assuming the latter still retains its place as the world’s largest social media platform) can only benefit from digital marketer’s lack of third-party data, and more businesses will come to rely on the vast amounts of data that those services provide users through their advertising platforms.