Season 5, Episode 6: The intended and unintended consequences of privacy regulation (with John Lynch and JP Dube)

02/04/25 • 39 min

My guests on this week's episode of the podcast are John Lynch and JP Dube. John is the University of Colorado Distinguished Professor at the Leeds School of Business, University of Colorado-Boulder, and JP is the James M. Kilts Distinguished Service Professor of Marketing at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

Together, along with a number of co-authors, they have written a draft paper titled The Intended and Unintended Consequences of Privacy Regulation for Consumer Marketing, which is the subject of our conversation.

Among other things, we discuss:

The various compromises that are inherent in instituting privacy-related data restrictions;
What regulators and government officials get wrong about personalized advertising;
The difference between consumers' stated and revealed privacy preferences;
The benefits to consumers of privacy;
The potential win-win proposition of personalized advertising and price discrimination;
How the GDPR should be instructive for US policymakers.

Thanks to the sponsors of this week’s episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast:

INCRMNTAL⁠⁠. True attribution measures incrementality, always on.
⁠⁠⁠Clarisights⁠⁠⁠. Marketing analytics that makes it easy to get answers, iterate fast, and show the impact of your work. Go to⁠⁠⁠ clarisights.com/demo⁠⁠⁠ to try it out for free.
ContextSDK. ContextSDK uses over 200 smartphone signals to detect a user's real-world context, allowing apps to deliver perfectly timed push notifications and in-app offers.

Interested in sponsoring the Mobile Dev Memo podcast? Contact ⁠Marketecture⁠.

Among other things, we discuss:

The various compromises that are inherent in instituting privacy-related data restrictions;
What regulators and government officials get wrong about personalized advertising;
The difference between consumers' stated and revealed privacy preferences;
The benefits to consumers of privacy;
The potential win-win proposition of personalized advertising and price discrimination;
How the GDPR should be instructive for US policymakers.

Thanks to the sponsors of this week’s episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast:

INCRMNTAL⁠⁠. True attribution measures incrementality, always on.
⁠⁠⁠Clarisights⁠⁠⁠. Marketing analytics that makes it easy to get answers, iterate fast, and show the impact of your work. Go to⁠⁠⁠ clarisights.com/demo⁠⁠⁠ to try it out for free.
ContextSDK. ContextSDK uses over 200 smartphone signals to detect a user's real-world context, allowing apps to deliver perfectly timed push notifications and in-app offers.

Interested in sponsoring the Mobile Dev Memo podcast? Contact ⁠Marketecture⁠.

Previous Episode

Season 5, Episode 5: The measurement myth

"Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don't know which half."

Knowing the context of his work, my view of the infamous quote attributed to John Wanamaker is that advertising measurement is fundamentally and necessarily uncertain, even in success. This surfaces another, in my view, invalid interpretation of the quote: that advertising is only effective when it can be measured perfectly, absolutely, and with total precision. To my mind, this has been the prevailing view within digital advertising sector: that advertising measurement is inherently defined by total, deterministic precision.

This is the measurement myth.

In this podcast, I’ll unpack the measurement myth and why I believe the digital advertising ecosystem is abandoning it in favor of more holistic, statistically sophisticated, and scalable approaches to advertising attribution and measurement. I’ll discuss some of the methodologies at the frontier of advertising attribution that are alleviating the need for deterministic identity in advertising measurement and how their use allows advertisers to materially expand the reach of their messaging, and what the implications of that are for the digital economy.

Resources referenced / cited in this podcast:

Thanks to the sponsors of this week’s episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast:

Vibe. Vibe is the leading Streaming TV ad platform for small and medium-sized businesses looking for actionable advertising campaign performance.
INCRMNTAL⁠⁠. True attribution measures incrementality, always on.

Interested in sponsoring the Mobile Dev Memo podcast? Contact ⁠Marketecture⁠.

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Next Episode

Season 5, Episode 7: Understanding the EU's AI Act (with Mikołaj Barczentewicz)

My guest on this week's episode of the podcast isMikołaj Barczentewicz. Mikołaj has appeared on the podcast a number of times -- he's a professor of law at the University of Surrey and holds a PhD in Law from the University of Oxford. He also regularly publishes thoughtful commentary on the EU regulatory landscape on hisSubstack.

In this episode of the podcast, among other topics, we discuss:

The EU's AI Act, which was passed in July 2024;
The broad status of AI regulation in the EU;
The Hamburg DPA's proposal that large language models do not store personal data and whether that view might be adopted broadly;
The EDPB's updated guidance on the ePrivacy Directive;
Google's decision to route cookie deprecation in Chrome through consent and whether the CMA is likely to accept that.

Thanks to the sponsors of this week’s episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast:

INCRMNTAL⁠⁠. True attribution measures incrementality, always on.
⁠⁠⁠Clarisights⁠⁠⁠. Marketing analytics that makes it easy to get answers, iterate fast, and show the impact of your work. Go to⁠⁠⁠ clarisights.com/demo⁠⁠⁠ to try it out for free.
ContextSDK. ContextSDK uses over 200 smartphone signals to detect a user’s real-world context, allowing apps to deliver perfectly timed push notifications and in-app offers.

Interested in sponsoring the Mobile Dev Memo podcast? Contact ⁠Marketecture⁠.