Philippe Gamache  0:07  
Music. What's up, guys, welcome to the humans of martech podcast. His name is John Taylor. My name is Phil Gamache. Our mission is to future proof the humans behind the tech so you can have a successful and happy career in marketing.

Philippe Gamache  0:25  
What's up everyone today, we have the pleasure of sitting down with Siobhan Solberg, data privacy consultant and advisor. Siobhan started her career as a classical musician in New York, where she had a variety of different teaching roles, specializing in violin and viola. She later moved abroad and pivoted to a content role at a media agency, where she would spend almost four years working her way up to crow manager and later head of BI and optimization, and finally, chief marketing officer. She completed her Certified Information Privacy Manager Certification and joined an accelerator program. And on the back of this experience, Siobhan founded raise a niche agency specializing solely in the measurement and optimization of marketing data, which she ran for five successful years. She's also the co host of marketing unfucked, a podcast about all things data ethics and privacy for marketing. She's currently studying towards an advanced masters of laws and privacy, cybersecurity and data management, and today she's working as a data privacy consultant and advisor to tech startups who want to get it right from the start. Siobhan, thanks so much for your time today. Really excited to chat.

Siobhan Solberg  1:30  
Thank you for having me, Phil.

Philippe Gamache  1:33  
This episode is brought to you by our friends at Knack launching an email or landing page in your marketing automation platform. Shouldn't feel like assembling an airplane mid flight with no instructions, but too often, that's exactly how it feels. Knack is like an instruction set for campaign creation, from establishing brand guardrails and streamlining your approval process to nack's no code drag and drop editor to help you build emails and landing pages. No more having to stop midway through your campaign to fix something simple. Knack lets you work with your entire team in real time, and stops you having to fix things mid flight. Check them out@knack.com that's K, N, A, K, and tell them we sent you. This episode was brought to you by our friends at customer IO, oversold on a legacy marketing automation platform that is still struggling to update its user interface. I've done a tour of duty with all the major marketing automation platforms, and many are definitely similar, but customer IO is the most intuitive and beautiful platform. I'm talking about the industry's top visual workflow builder to design and implement your unique messaging strategy, powerful AB testing features inside your workflows, not just on subject line sends, hold out testing functionality to see the incremental impact to your messages. Queue draft mode, so you can queue a messages and conditions in production with real users before anything is sent. Copy workflow items, so you don't have to repeat the building process again and monitor campaigns tests and key list membership growth from your personalized dashboard. The icing on the cake, marketers using customer IO have seen a 20% increase in conversion rates from strategic messaging. So stop using clicky old tools and adopt a multi channel approach that creates joyful interactions with your customers. Start a free trial without a credit card@customer.io and tell them we sent you. I think that there's a bunch of different jumping off points. I read a lot of your newsletters, a lot of your contents, but there's a lot of spice on LinkedIn these days about privacy. And you've actually said in a few places that marketers don't want to deal with privacy, but they need to stop resisting it, because their customers are already expecting it. It's mandatory in most countries around the world, but the US is really slow to adopt this, right? And there are several companies based in the US who are selling sleazy data products that are pretty much illegal in other countries, and their belief is that privacy is a political debate, it's not something that everyone needs to focus on and that there are actually way more people on the side of not caring about privacy and what companies do to resell their data. So what are your thoughts on these scumbag tools exploiting privacy laws, and do you think this is true, that there's as much, if not more, people who simply don't care about their PII being resold to other sites? Yeah.

Siobhan Solberg  4:26  
I mean, it's a tricky one, right? So we're really just speaking about the US, because, okay, there are some other countries, obviously, where there are also no privacy regulations, but in terms of larger populations, let's talk about the US. So it's also a cultural difference in the European Union, you probably wouldn't get away with that, but you can't anyway, either you can't. There have been studies done on this right, and it's quite interesting because, and I can't quote you any of the specific numbers anymore, off the top of my head, but. Having these studies done, for example, in the Netherlands, where they ask people, do you care about privacy? And the majority of people say, yes, yes, yes. And then they ask about, well, what do you do about caring about privacy? You know, do you anything from reject all on a pop up to being aware of where your information goes? And suddenly they're like, Oh, well, we don't care about that part. So there's a lot of when you start digging into it a little bit, some of it is, I'm supposed to care about my privacy, but we're not really sure if you do. So that has always been really interesting to me when I look at the numbers. But having said that, I think everyone cares about their privacy. Now we hear a lot about this. I have nothing to hide, therefore, but the truth of the matter is, we've seen it go so wrong, where, if just an image of you, can go completely wrong, that I think deep down, everyone actually cares about their privacy. I think it's just that people fear realizing that they don't have control. And when you realize you don't have control, then you'd much rather say, I don't care, because that's not a comfortable space to be in, right? To realize that, oh, I care what happens with my data, my personal data, my images. But I actually don't know how to control that, and it's very hard to control that, so then it's just easier to say, I don't care, and I have nothing to hide in this. In the States, I feel like they're still culturally I think it's still catching up. They don't care as much to say about the European Union. But that's also because regulation in the European Union has raised awareness earlier on, but seeing all the states coming up with all these price regulations, with AI now doing all of these things to images, voices, et cetera, I think, is becoming a discussion and something people are thinking about a lot more, and then These tools are just overstepping that.

Philippe Gamache  7:01  
Yeah, yeah, it's, it's interesting how separated a lot of the world is on on some of these issues, and I think that, like, can spam and GDPR have definitely forced folks to think more mindfully about how their data is shared. And maybe not everyone is reading all of those privacy policy and, like, what they're opting into when they're, like, downloading new tools, but at least like, they're thinking about, like, how is my data being used here? But it was interesting because, like, a lot of the threads on LinkedIn, there was a fair chunk of people, and I'm guessing some of those folks are from the US that were just like, Oh no, a company is sending to another company my email address because I viewed their website, like, Oh no, the world is going to end. And it's like, yeah, no, maybe not. But like, as a marketer, is trying to be as ethical as possible. I don't know it just like, it feels weird to, like, invest in a tool that's just trying to outrun privacy legislations because the world is going one way. The US is just slow to adapt. And I don't know, you've probably seen some of these debates on LinkedIn, and as someone like, obviously, on the pro privacy side, it must, in some ways, make you cringe a little bit. And I'm curious, like, what advice you have for marketers who are being asked to use some of these tools that are, like, kind of shady in that, like, gray area, they know that, like, they're illegal in in in Europe and stuff. So if, like, your company, and you have users that are based in Canada, in the US and in Europe, it's like, oh, I need to, like, filter 30% of, like, my traffic, and I can only use this for the US. Like, what advice do you have for marketers to become more informed, so that we can, like, reject unethical tools and understand the concept of, like, long term results, rewarding those who are better than black hat or like, gray hat tactics.

Siobhan Solberg  8:57  
I think the one thing it always comes down to for me. And every time I talk to a marketing team at any company, this is always the same thing. Put yourself in their shoes, right? I mean, it's classic. We give this. We give this to everyone. We tell this to kids when they're fighting. How would you feel that you do this if someone's bullying someone? How would you feel if it was happening to you? And what's the immediate response, oh, I don't want to be bullied, right? So it's the same thing. How would you feel that was being done to you? I think that as marketers, you can very quickly, and I mean, that's what I did for the longest time. You can very just so in it. You're so used to just doing it that it's your job, right? You don't think about the consequences anymore. But if you think for a moment, how would I feel if someone took my email address and gave it to x, y and z? How would I feel if someone shared, you know, all my information on LinkedIn with a bunch of other agencies so that they can have this killer CRM system cold email me with personal information you know about who I am? How would I really. Feel about that, and I wouldn't feel very good about that. And I think that a new when you discuss or decide to understand any tool and how it would make then just think about that, like, how would I feel? You know, it always amuses me when I talk to people in marketing, and if you ask them, How many people have an ad blocker, the majority of them have an app blocker. So they kind of don't want to see all these ads. What are you doing, right and and I think this is just one of those things. You have to put yourself on the other side. And then when you do that, obviously there are cultural elements as well. I remember, I traveled to Korea recently, about a year ago, and I was in shock. There is CCTV cameras everywhere. They're on cars. They're on in the woods. When you're hiking, they tell you, but everyone's walking around like this is completely normal, and I'm feeling extremely uncomfortable. So there are also cultural differences, right? So if you're marketing, and you're running a marketing agency in Korea, and you're marketing towards Koreans, something very different could be considered okay than in Germany or in the States. So I think you just need to put into context. And if you start putting things into context as to understanding the other side of it, immediately, I think you will make you won't necessarily make it legally always the right choices, but ethically, you will probably make better choices and and that's what's important, right? The legal bit, you let the lawyer do it, but or the you know, the advisor do it. As a marketer, you need to decide what you're comfortable with receiving and how people are marketing to you and then market that way to others?

Philippe Gamache  11:44  
Yeah, I think that's, that's great advice, and something that marketers need to take to heart. It's, it's easy, like, there's so much access to tracking that we've had for like, decades, right? Like, I remember when I got my start in marketing automation, like 15 years ago, and we had, like a JavaScript snippet on our site, and we could cookie people, and I remember, like, showing some of my friends that are in completely different industries, like just showing them, like behind the scenes and Pardot and Marketo, and like all these tools, like I can see someone download this form, and then they come back on my site and they open this email, and they click on this link, and they were just mind blown by, like, the ability to track people and like, at first, there's like, some cool things to it, but nowadays it's just like, I don't know. I just don't feel as excited about it anymore. Like, if I'm gonna use that to make someone's experience better, I wanna try to mindfully do it in a way that isn't creepy and like isn't obvious to that person, that I'm like Big Brother looking at all their activity, and I'm personalizing their emails because I know they clicked on this link or they viewed this page. So how do you like? What advice do you have for marketers for balancing this idea of like tracking what is necessary while personalizing experiences, without crossing that line of like, this is creepy. What is going on with my data? Type of like, barrier?

Siobhan Solberg  13:14  
Yeah, it's a tricky one, right? Because you want all the data. You need some of that data to be able to do your job, and at the same time, you don't want to be creepy. I mean, I still remember, and someone quoted me recently on this and completely out of context. But it's okay. It can, it can be taken out of context. I remember speaking at a conference and saying, you know, back when I was in measurement and technical marketing, it was like a playground. You could have so much fun with this data, and that's what we thrived on, right? We thrived on figuring out how to make new connections, how to create new segments, how to create new ideas, on how to market to different segments, and how, you know, we could see how they're acting on our website, and when could we catch them to do, etc. And it was really fun. But when you thought about it, if we did that to someone in real life, they would call the cops. So and now that there's all this regulation, and we can't do that, we need to figure out how to still be able to do what we need to right, to run a business, to be able to do our job and at the same time not be that creed. So I'm not saying it's easy. Let's make that very clear. Obviously, if someone says yes, here is my data and follow me around, then by all means, do, because they've consented to that. They're very aware of what hopefully, let's say they're probably not, but hopefully they're very aware of what they said okay to and then I don't say stop, because the truth is, you can only be so ethical, right? I mean, it's it. Ultimately, you can't sit there. Oh, he said it's okay to track him, but he probably didn't understand what I meant. So therefore I'm not going to track him. I think there's a limit there, um, so if they say, Okay, go for it. And if not, you're going to have to figure out if. Ways to do it. You know, aggregated data, maybe also think about what data you actually need. You know, back when I was working with data, I always said, what data will you actually will you action on? Like, these are the words I would usually use and and ultimately, how often do we collect all this data just because we might need it. Yeah,

Philippe Gamache  15:22  
it's such a fun topic, because, like, I'm as an end user, like, I will often opt in to, like, yes, you can have my data, because a lot of the times they say in the messaging that they will personalize my experience, they're going to make the experience better. But it's so rare that, like, your experience is actually personalized and improved because of the data that you're supplying them, like they're storing it somewhere, maybe they're using it and sharing it, but like they're not actually personalizing my experience. But I watched your episode with RP, our mutual friend on data beats about data minimization, and I thought it was super insightful and a perfect segue into this question here. And I think that you'd agree that most tech companies track all of the things and throw it into a data warehouse or a storage place somewhere, and regardless of existing or future needs for that data, they just did take all of the data. But data minimization, as you've explained, it tackles this issue by attempting to think mindfully, like you just said, about what you really need to track. What data do you need today? I'm curious to ask you, what advice do you have for teams that are trying to figure out this balance of only tracking what they really need today, but also thinking about 510, years down the line and the data they might need in the future? Yeah, I

Siobhan Solberg  16:41  
think that there we need to be careful, right? Because just in case data is not always just in case data and just in time data is usually too late. So there is a balance that needs to be found. And I think it really comes down to strategy a little bit, meaning, if you have a really good data strategy, then you already know where you are going. And it could be that you have this end point that you're going to where you will need all these different bits of information that you don't need right now and then. I'm not going to say don't collect that, because it's in your plan. So I think it's just, I feel that we got to get really lazy because we had all this data just, you know, granted, it was probably a mess, but we had it all and and we could just never have to think about the strategy or what we might need to do with it, or where we're going to be going with it, and how this all fits within the context of the business now, I think we need to be a lot more strategic, and we really need to think ahead. So I mean, I've worked with clients on this where they're asking me this, because legally, you also need to have a reason to collect it, a purpose to collect it. And then on top of that, for legal reasons, you need to keep it accurate, so you need to keep your data clean, which is great, but it's not that easy to do, as I'm sure we understand, if we've worked with it, right? So I think that when we build these strategies, and we can say the purpose is, because in one year's time, I'm planning on doing this, or in three years time, we are building this profile now to get there, it's skirting the lines a little bit, but I think that you have a valid reason, a purpose, you're accurate, you're being transparent about it, then I don't think that this actually negates this concept of data minimization and still helps the business within its context. But that's not easy. You now need to build a strategy. You need to now think ahead. You need to now figure out how you fit within the context of the business. And I, you know, I, I'm never going to be the one that says, Oh, just get rid of everything. And that's easy, and we're done. It's not easy. But I think we need to start thinking about that, because the the later we the more we wait for that, the we're going to be on the back foot. There have been people since 2019 who have been thinking about these strategies in the States because they know it's coming, right? Or they know that they're going to be expanding their markets to the EU so they might as well get comfortable with it now. So if you haven't thought about that yet, I think that's really the best place to start, and then you can figure out what data you actually need to collect. And hopefully you won't be in that camp of, oh, now it's too late. Yeah,

Philippe Gamache  19:31  
I think that it's becoming less of a nice to have a data strategy, and very much like a cornerstone of not just like the data team strategy, but like the business strategy as a whole, right? And maybe you can unpack some of this for the marketers that are listening, like myself, that aren't like, super familiar with with some of these terms there, but like, I know that from the business strategy comes the data strategy, and then the privacy strategy comes from the data. Strategy. But for listeners who aren't super familiar with like, data and privacy strategies, Can you unpack like, what does that mean exactly, and maybe touch on, like, the importance of considering data protection as part of those? Yeah.

Siobhan Solberg  20:14  
So this is tricky, and there are different thoughts. You know, there are different thoughts on this, obviously. So obviously, the overarching power is the business strategy, because ultimately, that's what it's all about, right? Um, and then everything else fits underneath it. I don't think, for example, that the data strategy comes hierarchy, you know, higher than the privacy strategy, because the privacy strategy also applies to various other aspects of the business, but I do believe that a good data strategy considers data protection. So what it comes down to is, when you're building a strategy of any sort, and you're trying to figure out what this data what the goal of this data is, right, your own KPIs, not the ones you're measuring for the business, but your owns as a team and and your data as KPI, when you're figuring all those out and how they will meet the objectives of the business, then you also need to think about what regulations or bills it needs to answer to, because you can't build a strategy without understanding what limiting factors you have on it. And this is why I always say that the data protection bit needs to be intertwined. Because the moment you take some of those main principles that you know your data protection officer or your chief privacy officer, or somebody might be able to tell you what they are, if you work with them together, and they explain that. Then you know how to include that within your data strategy from the get go. But if you build your data strategy completely independent, and then you have your business strategy, and then you have your privacy or data protection strategy, there's no they don't work together, and then ultimately, none of them will work towards the goal of the business which they need to so it is obviously hard to create any sort of strategy if the business doesn't have a strategy. But in most cases, even if there's no written one, or they can't give you one, there is still a very clear reason that the business is around. You know, it's an E commerce company that's designed to sell merch cool. We know what we're trying to do. You can figure out the objectives of the business. You might not be able to say, Okay, we want to expand to all these countries in the next five years. But you can get that through conversations. So you might not have the business strategy. But then, once you know what the basic objectives are, you can pull in the data a bit. The data strategy obviously includes also where you're storing it, how you're maintaining it, how you're collecting it, how you're processing it, how long will you keep it for? And some of these questions that I just said are actually driven by data protection, meaning, how long am I keeping the data for? How long am I legally supposed to keep the data for, and how long can I keep it for? What's the reason I'm collecting it? These are all little questions now that you have to ask within your data strategy that are really influenced by data protection, that we didn't ask beforehand. Maybe we should have, but we didn't, so it kind of all plays together. And I think the one thing I will always say, sit down with the various teams within your company as soon as possible. Don't wait until you build your great strategy and then bring in legal or the compliance officer or whoever it might be. It's too late bring them in in the beginning, because they can have that conversation for you, with you, and at the same time, they might have freely great ideas on how to actually make that happen.

Philippe Gamache  23:43  
Very cool. I was actually going to ask you later on, like, how things work with you and clients, like, what does it look like working with a privacy expert? But I think you kind of answered that in the design process, it's important to involve those folks as you're building out that strategy, as opposed to like, Hey, this is what I'm planning on doing. I've already started doing bits of this. Like, what do you guys think about that? This episode is brought to you by our friends at revenue hero, I can't think of anything worse than finding out a lead waited a week for a response from sales. That's why we recommend revenue hero. It's the easiest way to qualify leads based on Form Values or enrich data and route them to the right sales rep. Their product is packed with a bunch of behind the scenes superpowers that ensures qualified leads are assigned to the right reps, following your custom round robin rules and sending key data back to your CRM. That means more qualified meetings for your reps. We all know they want more of those, but more importantly, no more waiting time for your potential customers. They back all of this up with the best product support out there, offering 24, five support on Slack, connect for all customers No matter your pricing plan. So if you want to 3x your conversions with the same traffic, go to revenue hero.io, and. Tell them we sent you your sales team will thank you for it. This episode is also brought to you by our friends at census, the number one data activation and reverse ETL platform, loved by Activision, Canva, Sonos notion and more. As you might know, I'm pretty opinionated that the future of martech is composable and that the single source of truth for your marketing data should be your data warehouse. Census helps marketers solve an age old marketing problem, getting real time complete access to your customer data without needing to write a line of code. Also, if you want your own face as a humans of martech style image, we're doing a fun monthly raffle with census for a personalized t shirt, enter to win at get census.com/humans we just chatted about, like, all of the things that we can track, and the importance of having a data strategy and thinking about privacy and protection as a marketer, there's this thing that is like, not competing against data minimization, but almost like is making it really difficult. Like, I think that most of the folks that care about privacy in the company, on the legal side and on the data privacy side, there's also folks that care about revenue, and they care about figuring out what is the ROI of marketing and of sales, and that's when we get into attribution and multi touch attribution. And maybe some of the listeners are thinking that, like, Hey, I kind of need to track as much data as I can, because I don't have a multi touch attribution solution set up yet, and I might need, might need this data to stitch that customer journey together, because I don't know what touch points I'm going to need to answer the question to my C level folks of like, what is the ROI on what I'm doing right now? So I guess, like, what are your thoughts on Mark multi touch attribution and how it competes with data minimization and data protection, and how do you answer to the attribution cause while balancing data minimization.

Siobhan Solberg  27:04  
Yeah. I mean, it's tricky. Don't get me wrong. Jim would be here to answer this question. He would do this so well because all he does, but I'm going to try my best and not butcher it. No. So ultimately, what ends up the struggle right is that we need all these touch points to be able to attribute it to the correct places, right? And at this point, we're not going to get it. Is it a privacy problem? I mean, we're already not getting it most of the times, because we Safari iPhones. I mean, Google, if they ever decide to are not, you know, we have, we're already lacking a lot of information. Yeah. So if you are reporting on your ROI based off of the touch points, you can see it's already inaccurate. Yeah. So that's, I think, the first thing to remember. And then I feel like there needs to be a little bit of a mindset shift, in the sense of maybe we just try and figure out what we can relatively instead of accurately meaning we understand the flow. We understand what works better than something else, because proportionately, we probably have the same amount of numbers across the board, and then make decisions off of that. That doesn't obviously help with the ROI question to the CEO, but this is the conversation that needs to be had with the CEO, because the CEO is also fully aware that you're not going to be able to track everything. And when you're have your, you know, yearly meeting with him, and he says, I need to know the ROI, and I'm going to need to know the same thing next year, and I'm going to need to know how you improve. You need to start thinking, how can I report that? One way I know that people have started doing is to break it into smaller steps. So for example, instead of saying, all our conversions are coming from various places, right and this, we're giving this much to email, this much to social media, and this much to whatever else we're saying, break it down into the user journey steps. So how did you raise awareness? How did you get engagement? How did you get conversion? Then you're getting a little bit away from this, having to track multiple interactions. So you can say this set of ads or this channel took people to the site and raised awareness, so that that is the the benefit there. And usually that happens within one step, so you don't lose them so quickly, etc, etc. And then you have the same thing, how many people who did end up on the site then were engaged, and how many people who did, who were engaged then converted. So when we break it down, we have less chance for failure. That's what we want to call it. We just we have an easier way of putting it together, but it's really hard to have that conversation with the CEO who just wants to say what the bottom line was, right? But ultimately you can't. I. And the one thing you definitely can't, which everyone seems to want to do because they're all calling and trying to do this, is I'm trying to compare our numbers to five years ago. How do I do it? But you can't. You also can't compare how many sessions you've had to five years ago. You also you can't compare that. So it doesn't matter how much your stakeholders want that information you need to have a conversation with them, and if they don't want to listen to you, because your job is to tell them what the ROI is. Then bring in help. Bring in your compliance offer. Bring in, you know, the privacy person who understands measurement, bring in somebody who understands marketing and privacy, and have that conversation together, because then together, you can figure out, how do we measure from now on? Because you still need to measure and obviously, and I mean, I don't think I have to say this, but once someone purchases for you or converts that data is yours, and that's the only valid number you really have right the money in the pocket, how do you attribute it to marketing or to something else. It's a little tricky, you know, but everyone's coming up with ways. People are doing the pop up surveys after purchase. People are doing various ways of doing it, right? But you just you need to adjust your KPIs now. But it's not a purely privacy thing, and it's an issue you've already had. So the truth is, it's an issue you've already addressed two years ago where you should have addressed two years ago, and it's just going to become more of a concern.

Philippe Gamache  31:28  
Very cool. There's so many things to unpack in that answer there. I appreciate it. One thing you said is, like, there's so many touch points that we can't see, there are some that we can see, and so we know that it's not going to be 100% accurate. So how do we move to knowing that it's not everything, but like, we still have to measure something. So here's the slice of the world that we understand, and this is how we're breaking it up to kind of simplify it from like this multi touch journey where we're assigning dollars to channels. I'm curious to ask you about I don't know if this is new or not. Maybe this is actually like more old school, but I've had companies on the show that are like world class brands. I've chatted with Wistia and Ahrefs. These are the two that pop up to be and the founders and the leaders of those companies, they actually don't measure a lot of stuff. Like they measure engagement rates on videos and like, they'll look at some metrics on like blog posts and organic traffic. But like, Ahrefs doesn't even use Google Analytics this conversation of attribution and multi touch attribution, like they're sick, just thinking about it. It's not something they're ever gonna look at. So, like, what do you have to say to marketers that are just like, like, do we still need to measure like, these world class brands aren't measuring anything, like, they're measuring revenue, and revenue is going up, so they're clearly doing something right. They're continuously putting out quality content and has helped grow the brand. Like, what are what are your thoughts there?

Siobhan Solberg  33:05  
Yeah, so I'm definitely along the side, and I come from measurement, but I'm along the side where I don't actually think you need to measure all of that. Um, I just finished off a project with a very, very large museum, and they were switching over from one analytics stack to another, and as that was happening, and obviously, when you do this with a company that has a lot of data on also a lot of high profile data, you need to be very careful about how you label all those data points. And one of the conversations we had was, why are we even measuring why do we even need this information? We know who's donating. We know who's walking through the door, because we have tickets. So ultimately, what ended up happening is we stripped down the system significantly. It reduced risk, but it also reduced this overwhelm that the BI team had. They were so stuck in this data and constantly trying to churn out report after report for some manager who wanted to see a report that ultimately nothing was decided on. So I'm seeing a lot more people trying to measure less. But it doesn't mean you don't measure it just means you only measure what is important to your specific business. So, and that's different, really, for every single person, right? Like every single business and person. Because ultimately, what happens is some people also put their money in different channels. They you know, someone might not do social media and only do organic I know one client for them, the blog is the most important thing. That's all they measure is the blog, because that's what's important. That's what gets them their sales, that's how they get to the sales team. So not measuring any, not my thing. I think you needed to be able to make decisions, but choosing what to measure, and not getting stuck or lost in this, you know, in these vanity metrics. Ultimately. I think, allows for clearer decision making, and also for the stakeholders to make clearer decisions. So I think it's healthy, and I'm really happy to hear that there are larger companies out there that are doing that, because I think it's an important step to take.

Philippe Gamache  35:18  
Yeah, it's a it's a refreshing way to think about data, especially someone who's like, this first time in my career I've worn, like, the the sales hat and trying to get sponsorships and partnerships for the podcast, and I go down these rabbit holes with companies that are just like, Okay, well, what's what's like the typical CPA? If I'm gonna, like, give you this much? How many impressions am I gonna get? How many people are gonna come on my site? And I'm trying to turn conversations to be less about driving people to a site and driving revenue for them in a tangible ROI to having, like, a conversation about branding. And some of the companies that have signed up recently have because there is a budget where a person in the company that's responsible for like driving awareness and driving brand recognition for the company, and they aren't tied to an ROI number, like they don't need to prove ROI for those efforts. They're investing in quality content that they want to attach their brand too, and brands are kind of like waking up to this. So yeah, it's, it's exciting, for sure, but I feel like there's, there's a conversation about dark patterns on the web that I wanted to chat with you about, just not really a good, a good segue to that part, but you've written an awesome post about this topic, and essentially like dark patterns of explaining to its companies trying to trick users to do things they didn't necessarily intend to some marketers will call this like psychology and cognitive biases. But essentially, like some of the examples are like, confirm shaming, all those pop ups that you see, like, Oh, do you want this discount? Like, no, I don't want a discount link, or making one choice way more prominent than another one by like, pre ticking a box, or graying out another box, or making it really easy to buy, but then super freaking hard and annoying to cancel, and then there's a whole other box of like, I think I don't know who coined this, if it was you or not, but like, privacy suckering, essentially, not me. Yoga, getting users to Like Share way more data than than they intend to when they like opt in and first download an app. What advice do you have for marketers to stop thinking about this? Like marketing psychology and like creative ways of getting people to, like, opt in and buy or like cognitive biases, like, what should they be doing instead?

Siobhan Solberg  37:47  
Yeah, this is a tough one for me, because the reason I got into marketing was because of the whole marketing psychology angle. But I think there's a fine line between marketing psychology, and you're just trying to mess with someone like, you know, you can still apply whatever you know about, you know, I'm going to get slaughtered for this one, but best colors for your CTA, which we all know doesn't, you know, we all know where that goes. I'm not gonna explain that one, but um, or how people will scroll through a website, etc, that are not dark patterns. I think it's also lately become very quick that people quickly will label something a dark pattern that's actually not a dark pattern. It's just a little hard to comprehend. So I do think we need to be careful, um, but when you are like, you have malicious intent, when you are really trying to trick someone into agreeing to something that you know they will probably not agree to, that's a dark pattern, and I think that's when you need to step back as a marketer and say, Why am I doing this? Why am I like, Am I just trying to encourage a user to scroll through the website, or am I trying to encourage a user to click to the next page to get more information? Or am I trying to trick them into doing something they probably don't want to do? And those are very different things. So you know, you mentioned the pop ups. They're a great example, because a lot of people will be like, Oh, that's a dark pattern. It's not really. A lot of them aren't really dark patterns, just because the allow all button was there and the other one says, Click for more information. That's not a dark pattern. It's pretty clear what it's telling you. But yeah, if it says, you know the example you gave, which is the classic example, no, I don't want a discount. And you put it in, like, gray on, you know, light gray on white, and the big button says, I want a discount. That's probably a dark pattern, but it's also more that's confirmed shaming, right? It's shaming someone into doing something. So this is, this is when you're using psychology in a tricky or malicious way. Yeah. Yeah. So I think that there are lines, there are fine lines, and again, it just comes down to one of those things. How would you feel about that? And maybe one more question to ask is, do you think the user is aware of what's going on, right? And if they're aware of them, by all means, use every trick in the book that you have, but just don't do it maliciously. I mean, I know I wrote that post, and I got a lot of emails in response to that email, and people were arguing. You know, it's not all a dark pattern, or dark patterns are good. I think you can. I can't really see the dark patterns as a good argument, but I can see the not everything is a dark pattern pattern argument. And because dark patterns became a headline with the Fortnite, fine, and then suddenly everyone was quick to call out a lot more dark patterns that weren't dark patterns. So again, it's just one of those things. How would you feel about it, right? And if you don't know what you're agreeing to, then it's a dark pattern. When you're asked six steps to cancel, you know? And the cancel button is always a little gray one and the other one says, oh, I want to rejoin. It's a dark pattern. So you just have to, you have to be really analytical and really think about and analyze what it really is. I'm not saying stop using your best practices or your best tricks. I'm just saying and making it easier for users. A lot of times, the psychology or the way we design websites, or the way we optimize websites, is to make the user experience better. That's not a dark pattern. That is just making the user experience better, and you're using what you know about marketing psychology to do that. It's just if you're taking it a step too far that we have a problem, right?

Philippe Gamache  41:51  
Yeah, I often feel that the role of a conversion rate optimization manager is like competing with this idea of like being ethical and not overdoing some of the cognitive biases and the psychology behind some of the things you're doing, and focus on improving the user experience to improve conversion rates. But like you said, it is, it is a fine line. I think it does come down to ethics, like, if you were in their your user's shoes, like, Would you feel conflicted? Would you feel kind of, like, mis mistrusted? Because, like, I don't know how, like, what the conversion rates are for people that, like, click on the buttons, I feel like, I don't like a discount. Like, maybe a lot of people, like, opt in and you're happy about that. But like, what happens after like, Are they as likely to buy your product as the rest of your newsletter subscribers? Like, probably not. Like, the value of those people that you're tricking and like convincing to sign up is probably a lot lower. So yeah,

Siobhan Solberg  42:55  
and it gets back down to this idea of measuring the right things or the wrong thing. If you're giving a team member the KPI of get as many signups as possible, what do you think they're going to do? They're going to use a pop up like that. Because their KPI, what they're being measured on, what their raise depends on, is getting all the signups. It's not quality signups. And then that's always the point I want to, like, I want to make, is it's just, it's like retargeting. There's a lot of retargeting that's really badly What's your KPI, the audience you build, and how many people you're retargeting, or is it quality? And I think when you think quality over quantity, and you give people the correct KPIs, and you and you measure the correct things. Again, you measure less to measure really better, then ultimately you end up stepping away from some of these things that are blatantly illegal or just wrong and unethical.

Philippe Gamache  43:52  
Yeah, I like that. That line there, measure less to measure better. Maybe I'm thinking of how to title this episode there, but we're getting close on time. There is one topic I wanted to ask you before I ask you our last questions. Want to talk to you about the ethics of AI. We kind of like teased it a little bit at the top of the show, but obviously the common narrative these days around AI is like all the allure and the hype of it, and it's celebrated for transforming tasks and boosting productivity. But as a privacy and ethics minded marketer yourself, I'd love to get your thoughts on the ethical concerns and potential misuses, including AI's impact on artists rights, for example. Like, do you think we need to spend less time celebrating AI and more time confronting these ethical implications, like stealing from artists and advocating for Responsible governance to basically like have safeguards around all the potential darker issues with AI.

Siobhan Solberg  44:55  
Yeah, so this is the first time I'm going on record about my opinion on. All this. Um, ultimately, I'm definitely of the opinion that I I'm pro innovation, so I like the idea that AI is helping us with a lot of things, especially, you know, for for drugs and all these type of things for medical reasons. I think it's really, really great. But I think that we are whitewashing it. We are, we are not allowing ourselves to step back and look at the implications. And that's that's concerning for me. It is not easy. I mean, the in the European Union, the AI Act, is about to pretty much, it's pretty much done, is trying to address that. And they didn't do the greatest job at it either. I think that they had a lot of push and pull internally on how to address that, and how do you allow for innovation, while at the same time trying to control what's going on, and it's a line that's really hard to draw, but I do think that scraping data from all over websites that are public, I guess you could say, isn't cool when it's personal data, when it sometimes medical data, it can be, you know, determined what medical condition someone has based off of what forum they posted on. Um, you can create these databases worth of data that then we're modeling this whole, you know, the it's being modeled. I just have a hard time like, I know that you're not going to go to chat GDP and type in Siobhan something and it's not going to tell you anything accurate. I've done it. It gets given me a different CB six times in a row, so I'm good, and none of them were even remotely true. And it's not that my information isn't out there, so I think that we're still sitting there saying, Oh, it's okay because it's not real. But then is it okay? Then it's not real because it's still my name being tied together with a bunch of information. That's not true. So what if somebody thinks that's real? That's just as much of a risk to me than it being real. You know, when there were all these spoofs and someone could trick them into giving you a phone number, that was real. So I think that because the data is there and it, you know, it's being modeled, it's being the it's being trained on that data, you ultimately have the problem that could accidentally come out right or wrong. And this is the issue, I think some people are saying it's wrong, so it doesn't matter. And then when it comes to artists and authors who have worked really hard to do the work they do, and then it's just being replicated or spewed out, then I just think that it's just, I feel like there's this line that we've already crossed, and I'm not so sure we're gonna be able to go back on it. And there are people now raising concerns, right? There are authors raising concerns, artists, some celebrities are already speaking and voicing about it, and they're immediately putting being put down because of the innovation bit and and it's, again, it's cultural, right? So in the EU you get a lot less pushback for innovation. In the United States, you get a lot more. So I think that we've already, I've I personally think we've already overstepped the line. I think that there was kind of the Wild Wild West, and now starting to get regulated. It's a little too late. On top of that, the regulation is not necessarily as cut and dry as it should be to make it clear as to what's okay and what's not, and and because these companies need so much data, how it's also hard to understand how they could get that data in the right way, you know, because so people say, you know, train the models on synthetic data, etc. But ultimately, everyone comes up with ideas, and not necessarily valid ideas. So I can see both sides of the coin. I struggle with it ethically. I really struggle with it from a legal perspective. I don't have a clear opinion yet. I mean, I do in certain scenarios, but we won't get into those. But I think ethically, I think we've already gone a step too far, and not because I don't want it to go there, just because we weren't questioning things early enough. And now it's already all out there, um, but hopefully we'll see what happens. Everything can change, um, you know, and, and there's everyone from saying that they're going to take over the world to to, oh, it's just not a problem. So it's an interesting time to kind of be around and see how it develops. But yeah, I have my concerns with it for sure. Yeah,

Philippe Gamache  49:54  
such a great answer. Appreciate you breaking that down. I think there's like two camps of artists like. Like the ones that are just super pissed, and they're just like, wow, like, all my stuff was stolen, like, I can't find jobs anymore, and they're sulking, and they're pissed. And then there's the other camp of artists that are just like, How can I pivot, how can I innovate, how can I leverage some of these tools myself? Like, people are building images partly based on the images that we created, like, how can I create, like, a smaller, customized model based on just the art that I've done to, like, streamline my work? Or, I don't know there's, there's a balance between those two. And it's, it's interesting to see where, where that's gonna go. But as heavy mid, mid journey users ourselves on the podcast. It's, it's a topic that we find super interesting. Folks love the artwork, but I know that there's, like, a lot of ethical complexities behind it there. So I appreciate you. You sharing your issue on this is flown by. I've got one last question for you. Okay, we asked this to all of our guests. You're a solopreneur, data privacy consultant, a writer, a speaker, a mother of canines, an iron woman, triathlete and a deliverer of harsh truth. One question we ask everyone on the show is, how do you remain happy and successful in your career? How do you find balance between all the things you're working on while staying happy? Yeah, it's

Siobhan Solberg  51:16  
all about work life balance. It's easy for me to stay happy. I'm in Greece. It's Always Sunny. I work from home, and I have a garden. So I know I really, I have to say that having a really great support system, and having figured out, after a long time how to to know when I going to work, when I'm going to study and when I'm going to live my life, and not being guilty about being in any of those and not beating myself up if I skip it. That has allowed me to just be in the moment and be good, though,

Philippe Gamache  51:50  
amazing, short, but powerful. My wife and I went to Greece for our honeymoon, and definitely a spot that we want to go back to. I think, yeah,

Siobhan Solberg  52:00  
got a place to stay now,

Philippe Gamache  52:03  
amazing. Yeah, really pumped to meet your your two canines also. Yeah, definitely. Thank you so much, Yvonne, this is a super fun conversation. Really appreciate your time. Thank

Siobhan Solberg  52:12  
you, Phil. Talk to you soon. You

Philippe Gamache  52:23  
you folks, thank you so much for listening this far. We really appreciate you being here. Just wanted to call out two things before we go. Number one, the best way to support the show is by signing up for our newsletter on humans of martech.com we send you a quick email every Tuesday morning letting you know what episode just dropped, we include our favorite takeaways. So if you don't have time to listen to that one, no pressure. We have you covered with some learnings anyway. And number two, proceeds from sponsors this year have allowed us to venture into video. We recently launched a YouTube channel where we publish full length episodes. So if you want to see our radio faces, check that out. That's it for now. Really appreciate you listening again. Thank you so much. You.

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