This show is brought to you by Transcend, the privacy infrastructure company that unleashes growth for the world’s leading brands. Unlike legacy tools which create manual bottlenecks, Transcend embeds data and consumer preference governance directly into business systems–so teams can confidently and quickly activate data for AI, personalized experiences, customer engagement and growth at scale and with reduced risk. Learn more at www.transcend.io.
With AI making it easier than ever to generate content, and consumers demanding more privacy than ever, is the promise of true 1:1 personalization now an impossible myth?
Agility requires both adaptation to new AI-based tools and methods while also navigating the complex and shifting landscape of consumer trust and data privacy. It’s about being responsive to both the opportunity and the responsibility.
Today, we’re going to talk about the central paradox facing marketers: the mandate for deep, AI-powered personalization is growing at the exact same time that access to the data that fuels it is becoming more restricted by privacy regulations and consumer skepticism. We’ll explore how brands can bridge this gap, build trust, and turn privacy from a compliance hurdle into a competitive advantage.
To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome, Phyllis Fang, Head of Marketing at Transcend.
About Phyllis Fang
Phyllis Fang is Head of Marketing at Transcend, the leading privacy infrastructure company. Before joining Transcend, Phyllis held senior marketing roles at Uber, where she drove the company’s safety products. Her work included launching features like the Door-to-Door Safety Standard, which went live in 70+ countries during the Covid-19 pandemic. Earlier in her career, Phyllis worked across digital and product marketing for e-commerce and consumer applications. Phyllis graduated from UC Berkeley and is based in San Francisco.
Phyllis Fang on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pdfang/
Resources
Transcend: https://transcend.io/
This show is brought to you by Transcend, the privacy infrastructure company that unleashes growth for the world’s leading brands. Unlike legacy tools which create manual bottlenecks, Transcend embeds data and consumer preference governance directly into business systems–so teams can confidently and quickly activate data for AI, personalized experiences, customer engagement and growth at scale and with reduced risk. Learn more at http://www.transcend.io.
Read Transcend’s report: Hidden in Plain Sight: How Consent and Preference Data Are Driving Enterprise Growth
Register now for Sitecore Symposium, November 3-5 in Orlando Florida. Use code SYM25-2Media10 to receive 10% off. Go here for more: https://symposium.sitecore.com/
Catch the future of e-commerce at eTail Palm Springs, Feb 23-26 in Palm Springs, CA. Go here for more details: https://etailwest.wbresearch.com/
Connect with Greg on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregkihlstrom
Don’t miss a thing: get the latest episodes, sign up for our newsletter and more: https://www.theagilebrand.show
Check out The Agile Brand Guide website with articles, insights, and Martechipedia, the wiki for marketing technology: https://www.agilebrandguide.com
The Agile Brand is produced by Missing Link—a Latina-owned strategy-driven, creatively fueled production co-op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. https://www.missinglink.company
Transcript
Greg Kihlstrom (00:00)
With AI making it easier than ever to generate content and consumers demanding more privacy than ever, is the promise of true one-to-one personalization now an impossible myth? Agility requires both adaptation to new AI-based tools and methods while also navigating the complex and shifting landscape of consumer trust and data privacy. It’s about being responsive to both the opportunity and the responsibility. Today, we’re going to talk about the central paradox facing marketers.
The mandate for deep AI-powered personalization is growing at the exact same time that access to the data that fuels it is becoming more restricted by privacy regulations and consumer skepticism. We’ll explore how brands can bridge this gap, build trust, and turn privacy from a compliance hurdle into a competitive advantage. To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Phyllis Fang Head of Marketing at Transcend. Phyllis, welcome to the show.
Phyllis Fang (01:26)
Hey, Greg. It’s great to be here.
Greg Kihlstrom (01:28)
Looking forward to talking about this with you. Definitely a lot of important things to cover here. Before we dive in though, why don’t you give a little background on yourself and your role at Transcend?
Phyllis Fang (01:38)
Yeah, for sure. So I lead marketing at Transcend. We’re a data permission company. We help some of the world’s largest and best known brands power their growth initiatives. So that’s everything from launching a retail media network, expanding into D2C, developing AI products and features for a platform, or even simply, know, stitching together a seamless user journey across different geographies, across multi-brand portfolios. A bit about me and my background. So I actually started my career in e-commerce and in the fashion world. Greg, was actually listening to the episode you did with Eric Litke from Under Armour. Yeah, yeah. And he actually, I found he put this so well. This was the early days of e-comm when a company’s website was equally about their brand presence and their digital presence and engagement as much as it was about shopping and product promotion and transacting and all that. So that’s my early roles were. It was around email marketing, growth marketing, e-commerce. Those are very much deep in like the tools, the systems, audience segmentation where I learned on mechanics of MarTech and MarOps. But I think because I came up in my marketing career during that era of ⁓ e-commerce, I’m also very well versed in the digital storytelling, how to introduce a brand online, driving the consumer behavior engagement outside of just pure shopping. And then from there, I spent four years at Uber, primarily focused on our safety portfolio. The six months really introduced me to that tension between growth, between trusts.
How are you balancing customer acquisition, engagement, aggressive growth targets while ensuring transparency, building your confidence and brand favorability? And I think all that’s kind of come together nicely in my work now at Transcend where we’re helping these Fortune 500 companies and category leaders enable that growth and that innovation within frankly like a risk sensitive, a technical environment that is personal data collection, personal data storage downstream activation, all the bits and bobs to make that plumbing happen and all the ⁓ user preferences and choices that empower that data to flow through that layer. So I actually really like to say that, you know, within every modern growth initiative, whether that’s a shopping journey and ad experience, this relies on first party and zero party data, of course. And that personal data must be consented to, must be ethically collected and then properly governed.
downstream in order to even make these really cool, sexy digital projects and growth initiatives possible. There is actually that middle layer, this is where Transcend plays. It’s not easy, right? There’s a lot that needs to happen to bring all that together seamlessly and accurately and ethically, whether that is stitching together identifiers across different tools, ensuring that user choices are enforced consistently, collected in real time activated across all the marketing, advertising, third-party systems that any modern enterprise is plugged into. But I’m a marketer myself, I’ve always been a marketer, and I like to zoom out and even look at the layer before that, which is you need individuals to even know your brand and then have confidence in who you are, build a trust and relationship before they’re even going to raise their hand and entertain the option of giving you access to their data and consenting to that.
Transcend plays in that middle layer of the data capture and permissioning downstream activation, but really this is a marketer’s problem, from brand awareness all the way through to the more tech and the more ops.
Greg Kihlstrom (05:13)
Yeah, yeah. And so, yeah, let’s let’s dive into that and really start with this. You know, it’s it’s certainly a strategic imperative to say that, you know, we need to reconcile much to what you’re just saying, reconciling this need for very laser focused personalization, as well as the the need for data privacy. And doing that, you know, there’s lots of things going on in the background that, know, I know, you know,
many listeners, if not all listeners are aware of, but may not know what to do about necessarily, you know, shared cultural moments, you know, kind of disappearing or maybe being minimized in some ways, A.I. commoditizing content. Again, you know, with all of this, really, the the answer is this this really narrow and focused personalization. So from a strategic viewpoint.
Why is the, that old marketing playbook of broad strokes, segmentation, just not breaking through the noise and not, not effective.
Phyllis Fang (06:14)
Yeah, I mean, I think that’s a lot of what you said. You we’re increasingly in a digital world where we’re looking at echo chambers of our algorithms and our own content. There’s fewer of those sheer cultural moments to build personalization around. AI is really leveling the playing field on creative outputs. So differentiating is going to take more in terms of how a brand shows up, how they activate their data, the relationship they build with their customer.
I was actually just at an event with a bunch of other B2B marketers this week and we were joking about how sad it was that we were all sold this very shallow version of personalization, which was just like, hi, first name. Nice to see that you work at company. Like that is not personalization and people are, know, today’s consumers are digitally savvy and they want, and they expect a lot more of that. So I really, yeah, a hundred percent agree with you. The future is going to be towards more and more laser focused and pinpoint personalization.
But I do want to call out like, this is very much still like a crawl, walk, run thing. There’s still a lot to be gained from the sort of broader strokes motions. We actually at Transcend did some research and put out a report earlier this year where we surveyed marketing, security, and privacy professionals. In that research, only 42 % of those respondents even told us that they were using preference data to do things like personalized campaigns, personalized offers. So there’s still so much untapped opportunity here, but I think you know, to put on the consumer hat, this is where consumer expectations are going, this is where digital behavior is pointing to.
Greg Kihlstrom (07:45)
Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah. And I think, you know, consumers, even if they don’t know how marketing works from, the the the detailed view, I think they can. They’re savvy enough to know that they know the I call it substitute like you first, you know, insert first name here like that’s to your point, that’s not personal. That’s like substitution of of, you know, hello or whatever. And so, you know, I think they’re.
They’re savvy and they’re getting savvy, savvier as well. You know, think to point to the report that you recently put out as well, you know, one of the other things that I found interesting in there is most companies have massive amounts of what’s referred to as shadow data. And, you know, just curious if you could talk a little bit more about that and just, you know, how does this undermine or affect that consumer trust that’s so, you know, so
critical here as well.
Phyllis Fang (08:41)
Yeah, and in situ. So shadow data, like that’s really data that’s collected without awareness, or maybe it’s ungoverned. Maybe it’s, you know, it was collected ethically in this one use case in this one channel, but it is living in a certain silo within the business or within that company’s data ecosystem. So all that shadow data floating throughout an organization’s tech stack that creates
unseen risks that erodes transparency. And as a marketer, as an operator, you don’t always know what data is permissible to use. then if you, like to at Transun we like to talk about this concept of like over permissioning and under permissioning. Over permissioning means you’re using data, you’re using, you know, personal data where you probably shouldn’t or you’re using it in a way where it wasn’t consented to. And that is what, you know, what leads to the, of course, the regulatory risks and just like overreaching, but also just erodes transparency because to your point, like customers are smart. Now they like, they know when personalization is shallow and just like a dynamic field substitution, but they also can instinctively sense, you know, when brands overreach or they mishandle data and that leads to far graver consequences. Opt-outs, people just like churning off of your brand or just completely blocking ads. And that just kills personalization like right out the source.
Greg Kihlstrom (10:04)
And so, you know, building building on this, this idea of building trust and this foundation of trust. Recent stats from Adobe found 71 percent of consumers see personalization as critical, but only 34 percent think that brands actually deliver. It kind of mirrors what you were saying earlier. You know, what do we do here? You know, what are maybe the first one or two things that a marketing leader should do to start closing this this considerable gap? Yeah.
Phyllis Fang (10:30)
Yeah, because we can talk all we want about this is an issue. What are your steps, right? So I think the first one really is to outline, audit, architect the data touch points across your user experience. And that includes everything from third party partnerships to, of course, your own channels and own experiences. So just identify where user choices are being collected or where they’re just being utilized to deliver a certain message or certain creative, a certain, you know,
experienced. And then really it’s about operationalizing those user choices. So preference signals, when, you say I consented this, but I don’t consent to this, and I’m going to show you this, but only use I-biometric data in context of x. All of those preference signals need to be deeply integrated within a MarTech stack in this example. So your CRM, your ad platforms, anything else in that customer service,
All of those channels that then go out and touch those users again need to be able to operate on compliant and real-time data. And this actually needs to be a fairly deep integration because I can’t simply just say like, hey, meta ads, don’t advertise to Greg. There’s an actual signal on you. the flat. All of that is very robust. So that needs to be deeply connected. And that’s kind of the meat of it. And that means this is, I think a lot of companies
They have technology in place, of course, to market and advertise and collect data. But companies also, from what we’ve seen working with our customers, is that they rely on process and people to fill some of those technology gaps. And of course, you know, it results in just human errors and inefficiencies. And frankly, like way too many CSV files that’s saved on an individual’s desktop somewhere.
Greg Kihlstrom (12:21)
some of those. Yeah. And, you know, I mean, of course, from the from the consumer perspective, it’s like to get someone to consent to that, you know, brands can’t take that for granted anymore of just, know, the consumers are just going to blanket accept things. And so this brings us to this this value exchange, which, you know, the consumers
Phyllis Fang (12:23)
Yeah, I’ve been guilty in a fast life too.
Greg Kihlstrom (12:49)
need to feel like if I give something to this hotel company that I’m going to get the room that I want when I when I, you know, first time I check in or whatever, you know, there’s there’s got to be that that value exchange. So, you know, beyond simply just saying we’re going to give you a better experience, you know, quote unquote, whatever that means. Yeah. What are like tangible examples that, ⁓ you know, could convince that that savvy consumer to willingly trust a brand with their data?
Phyllis Fang (13:19)
Yeah. Well, this is like, this is where it gets fun, right? This is where you’re able to build really valuable, meaningful and personalized experiences. And that, that definition of value and a tangible experience can mean so many different things. Personalized loyalty or rewards that visibly reflect those data choices. So I think a lot of retailers do this well. Sephora’s like rewards program is a great example. They’re asking for, you know, your eye color, your skin tone and being able to then take those preferences once a consumer has opted in and turn that around to personalize recommendations. A lot of financial services apps will do this with credit insights or budgeting tips in exchange for seeing a user’s transaction data, right? That just makes the experience more valuable and personal. And I think we can’t forget like real utility by way of convenience, by way of time savings, continuity.
Cross device experiences, when a user is opted in that persists across different devices or browsers, wishlist, transactions, that kind of stuff. That’s real utility and it’s not just like being marketed to in a better way.
Greg Kihlstrom (14:27)
Yeah, yeah. mean, I think and maybe that’s underrated, I would say, you know, in, you know, but and yet as a consumer, because we’re all also, you know, we’re marketers, but we’re also consumers in real life. I mean, some of those the utility stuff is what I value the most. And yeah.
Phyllis Fang (14:45)
Yeah, totally, totally. you’re right, it is undervalued from the organization and the operator’s perspective because it’s not, it’s part of like our, it’s table stakes now in our digital world, right? But it’s not the flip of a switch. Like there’s actually a lot of data and plumbing and user choices and all that needs to line up to even be able to deliver app baseline digital experience seamlessly.
Greg Kihlstrom (15:07)
Yeah. And I think, you know, I was just doing an interview a little while ago of just on how simple things are often, you know, making something simple for a consumer is often very complex from a technical perspective. And so, you know, it’s why companies like Apple, you know, like the design from that design perspective, it’s like, yes, a lot of thought goes into these very seemingly simple things. So, yeah.
Phyllis Fang (15:34)
The thing with copy, the fewer the words, the more time it took to count, right?
Greg Kihlstrom (15:37)
Totally.
Yeah. Yeah. So I want to talk now about, you know, a lot of, let’s say, data privacy conversations often start with this idea of, you know, risk mitigation, you know, avoiding fines, you know, GDPR and all that kind of stuff. And certainly that’s that stuff is very important and needed. But there’s lots of components. I mean, we’ve already talked about several components of this.
and the importance of data privacy. You how can marketing leaders kind of reframe this as not just risk, you know, mitigation and avoiding the negative part, but really the positive business impact of strong privacy practices?
Phyllis Fang (16:23)
Yeah, yeah, think this is such a great question because so oftentimes, marketers are thinking about privacy as a last mile, check the box before I hit deploy. really, lot of this needs to be thought about so much further upstream. And we’re just not used to thinking that way because privacy as a term, as a department, it just feels removed from our day to day. But just coming back to this theme of over-permissioning versus under-permissioning user data, I think this is actually a good analogy for that.
privacy marketing tension. So traditionally when we think about avoiding fines or being audited or even brand backlash, if there’s a breach or something bad happens, the way that people try to solve that and the way organizations try to solve that right now is through under permissioning. We’re just gonna do less, we’ll just sit on top of our hands and only do whatever we feel comfortable with, with whatever risk appetite. Or the flip side to that is some companies will just say, a fine is a risk like cost of doing business and we’re just gonna keep pushing forward with it because the upside is greater. Really, like the way I would tell marketers to start to think about this reframe is that we need to be able to show that trustworthy data pipeline is expandable usable data. So that expands your overall audience size and under permissioning is actually leading to a huge opportunity costs. You’re not able to market to an additional audience or
perhaps you need to actually just do more generalized marketing to everyone, even if parts of your audience are irrelevant. That’s wasted ad spend, that’s higher row ad. That’s also not great. And so I think that’s the area where as marketers, we’re good at this. We can chase those metrics downstream into the KPIs that we want, that we need to tell specific stories, whether that is translating across opt-outs to our overall kind of marketable audience to how that impacts things like customer LTV or engagement rates or even basket size by being able to show the right recommendations. I would really think about it as opportunity costs and being able to like how large is your available audience to market to and how much do know about them such that you can do it in a very strategic and resource and apps beneficial way.
Greg Kihlstrom (18:39)
Yeah, yeah. mean, yeah, I’ve been, you know, outside of podcasting, I do consulting for enterprise orgs. And I’ve been in those conversations where we are literally letting money sit on the table, so to speak, because it’s a it’s a lowest common denominator approach. And some of these these orgs, at least it’s like, you know, and again, totally, I respect the risk aversion. But at the same time, to your point,
There’s so much opportunity there to do it and there’s tools to to allow us to do it well. Right. So.
Phyllis Fang (19:11)
Yeah, definitely not saying just like throw your wrist gene out the door and go wild. But yeah, there are tools to do this stuff more surgically such that you don’t need to just do lowest common denominator marketing or strategy. And you can, you know, reach a cross brand audience or reach a different segment that you otherwise wouldn’t have been able to tap into.
Greg Kihlstrom (19:31)
Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, a lot of companies are, you know, some are way further ahead on the the AI adoption scale, some some a little further behind. But certainly, you know, personalization powered by AI is something I mean, I I love the promise of that because I think, you know, we’ve been talking about personalization for years. And I think some of the recent, you know, generative AI stuff is helping us unlock some of that stuff. But
Certainly it also brings some additional concerns of personalization powered by AI. How can teams be confident that the data that they’re using still kind of reflects that customer intent that we’re talking about?
Phyllis Fang (20:14)
Yeah, yeah, for sure. And I agree with you. It’s an exciting time to be a marketer. But this is very much still, I think we’re all still working through this, even the companies that are out ahead and adopting this. The one thing I can say though is that as we do more more AI powered personalization campaigns and outreach, the data inputs and how data lives within an enterprise.
ecosystem is only going to get messier and more circuitous in the sense that you’ll be further, more degrees removed from that point in time where a user gave consent or told you their preferences or gave you that first or zero party data. The data is going to start to train on itself. It’s going to get circuitous and messy. All of this is going to increase in its importance. One of the main data actions that we had been seeing customers pull across into their worlds and into their user experiences is the do not train actions. So you, Greg, could say, hey, I want to engage with this AI product, or I want this AI-powered experience, but I don’t want you to train on the data that I’m giving back to you or the data that you’re using. And being able to honor that signal, of course, is technically going to get more more complex with these circuitous data cycles. But that is where this is going to go. It’s going to be less around like,
I accept cookies to understanding if your data is being used to train either your own experience and maybe that’s okay from a consumer standpoint, or if your data is being used to train a larger model. Again, maybe some consumers are fine with that in certain instances or not, but this is where it’s going to get increasingly more granular. And I think we’re certainly, you know, we’re certainly at the early stages of this and it’s going to be fun to watch this all unfold.
Greg Kihlstrom (21:59)
Yeah, yeah, definitely. So yeah, and kind of to that point, talking about, you know, kind of what’s next as we kind of wrap up here, you know, getting getting all this right. It’s not just about the the marketers and the CMO, but it’s about, you know, CMO, CIO, you know, CISO, you know, all of the all of the acronyms, right? Like kind of get it getting together, right? So, you know, how do you how do you see the responsibilities of these roles?
Converging, diverging, how do you see this kind of playing out over the next few years?
Phyllis Fang (22:32)
Yeah, it’s a great question. And I think the companies that do this well will have leaders that are able to speak each other’s languages and also ensure that collaboration not only starts at the very top, but it happens in tight partnerships throughout the organization because like we were talking about earlier, the guy with the CSVs on his desktop needs to be able to then go back and talk to his counterparts in different organizations. But around those different functions, I think it really is going to be about
the CIO and the IT department ensuring that the data that the enterprise has is discoverable. So know where is. There’s none of that shadow data. It’s governable. It’s interoperable between systems. The CSO and oftentimes the privacy leader here is also going to ensure that it’s ethically collected. It’s secure access controls following regulatory requirements. The CMO and their, orb, it’s their job to really take that
data foundation and translate that into customer value, into loyalty, into engagement. And I think the part that we need to really make sure as marketers that we’re keeping our pulse on is that it’s also the marketer’s role to go back up and advocate for the data foundation that they need to drive those initiatives and growth goals. think this is a little bit to marketing’s detriment where so often times we’re on the receding end of the data that comes out and we’re just like, well, this is what we can do, or this is like, that’s that.
And really, I think it’s up to the marketers to really understand the upstream data collection, data piping points and advocate for what they need.
Greg Kihlstrom (24:09)
Yeah, yeah. And then, you know, kind of from the consumer standpoint, you know, kind of looking out a bit. Yeah. You know, there’s there’s kind of two extremes, and I don’t think either of them will be 100 percent true. But, you know, there’s this this world where, you know, I just kind of does all personalization and, know, kind of I get maybe it runs amok, let’s say, because we’re talking extremes or, you know, there’s there’s this other extreme where consumers hold their data so tightly that
The AI doesn’t have enough information to work off of, where, you know, where do you see things kind of netting out after, know, admittedly, we I think we all have some things to work out as an industry, probably. But but yeah.
Phyllis Fang (24:51)
Yeah, yeah, it’s definitely going to be a dual reality. But the AI automated personalization, that trains at the station. But I think consumers are increasingly demanding more controls, more transparency around their data and how it’s being used. eventually, hopefully, I’m very optimistic and hopeful here that consumers will advocate for a world where they can gate access to their data through whether it’s layers of consent or certain touch points or certain ecosystems. And then it’ll be on the enterprises and the companies to make sure those worlds and those journeys and those specific touch points are clearly communicated and surface as choices. And then of course, honor on the backend.
Greg Kihlstrom (25:30)
Yeah, yeah. Love it. Well, Phyllis, thanks so much for joining today. Really, really enjoyed talking about this with you. One last question before we wrap up. What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
Phyllis Fang (25:42)
Great question. There’s so much great content and expert voices out there. think like I said earlier, it’s a really fun time to be in marketing. But there’s a lot to consume and learn from, right? And I’ve really found for myself that you need the fallow time to borrow the term from agriculture to really just let it percolate and crystallize into actual projects or regional thoughts. For me, that’s making sure I’m able to go take a walk. I, for better or for worse, live near some cell phone dead zones.
So sometimes I’m just like, well, I don’t have service. guess I’m going to just think about things as it’s walking or maybe I’m just like doodling on my sketch pad, getting out of digital and moving my body in some way to really let that kind of marinate in order to stay agile.
