Fast Five: People.io

We’re Sarah and Tash, bringing you the Fast Five on our 26^th May Curious agency talk with people.io.

What’s the Fast Five? It’s the five top-line takeaways about the tech we saw from this Thursday’s talk. What’s this week’s fast five

1.Data-informed campaigns don’t have to be at odds with transparency. Nic, the founder of people.io, posed a funny analogy about the ad industry: it’s often the equivalent of advertisers sneaking up behind people and then trying to figure out from a set of clues what it is that those people like. people.io is designed to eliminate this need, instead paying people to share data (through answering questions or linking their accounts) and being entirely transparent along the way.

2.But transparency doesn’t necessarily require simplicity. The assumption models that people.io’s brand/agency facing company C8 are able to engineer based off the data collected are remarkably complex. From answers to specific questions to incidental data collected from actions on social sites (like location, for instance), people.io say they’re getting closer to definitively demonstrating conversion and ROI.

3.Giving consumers total control is actually a good thing. At a minimum it engenders trust and is more morally squared than most alternatives. But it also primes people to be engaging in a certain type of interaction and, by requiring explicit declarations of interest in brand interactions, generates super-high-value in-market conquest opportunities.

4.In fact, all of this opens the door to even cleverer – and more useful! – messaging and strategies. Nic gave a brilliant example of a campaign run for local florists in the late afternoon/early evening of Valentines Day. It targeted a certain subset of men with the question of whether or not they had a girlfriend or partner, and, if their answer was yes, followed this up with a question about whether they’d gotten them anything for Valentines Day yet. If they answered no, they were then served a final message directing them to places they could purchase flowers–good for the brands, of course, but also very good for the men who’d received the helpful tips.

5. Best get on board with it because a host of reasons are going to require advertisers to gain more informed consent, anyway.Between the General Data Protection Regulation put in place by the European Commission this past April (set to go into effect in 2018) and ad-blocking efforts on an individual level and, potentially, on a network level (by Three), the question of both how to learn about and how to reach the public is going to be getting significantly more tricky. The onus is on us to develop better, smarter ads and, of course, to be ethical about the data people are willing to share.

Curious about what else you might’ve missed? Reach out to someone involved in Curious and be sure to watch-out for our next Fast Five covering the Curious Session on 2^nd June with Flapit.

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