🧚♂️ Disney's data business, how cookies were baked 🍪 and Privacy as a Spotify playlist 🥁
👋 Hello!
Busy week over at STRM HQ! Lots of privacy, and lots of engineering (we're now deployable through AWS directly!).
Jumping right in, Mind the Gap#7 has an inside view of the data economy through the eyes of Disney and a cool story about how cookies (those in your browser) were originally baked.
Some STRM milestones too: we welcomed Malin to the team, who can explain how to de-risk data even if it's "not a priority right now".
Happy reading! Suggest to turn on our Spotify playlist on Winning Privacy Discussions in the background and don't forget to spread the word and hustle us some extra subscribers!
-Pim
Disney, the unexpected ad tech giant
A few weeks ago, one of my sons asked about my favourite movie when I was his age. My answer: Robin Hood. I still think it is a lovely, innocent story (the historical background is less innocent). The videocassette is somewhere in an old box, but my tv won't even connect to a VHS player anymore. That's a long gone era.
Another long gone era: Disney's innocence.
The STRM team learned how Disney is (somewhat hidden to the general public) building an advertising business through the video below (which is intended for Disney's own Ad Sales teams).
It shows how much second order value creation data can enable: through its reach Disney has become a competitor for advertising dollars to the more usual suspects. Circumstantial evidence of the size of that market: Amazon is expected to make up for all the investments into media streaming from just the video advertising income alone.
"Data clean rooms"
Now, of course Disney is aware of the privacy implications of what they are doing.
Their solution is data clean rooms: basically a data warehouse accessible to their advertisers where they can run analyses. The big privacy advantage is Disney actually retains control over the data. The big strategic advantage is of course they are in a position to command coming to them for uncovering insights. These can then be fed into planning how to spend more with Disney Advertising. Combined with an interesting deal with an ad tech partner, it sets them up for a future beyond third-party tracking.
Vice has all the background:
Joseph Cox
How the web's cookies came about
MORE THAN TWO DECADES AGO, WEB PIONEER LOU MONTULLI INVENTED BROWSER SOFTWARE COOKIES WITH THE GOAL OF PRESERVING USER PRIVACY ONLINE. BUT THEN THINGS TOOK AN UNEXPECTED TURN.
We've argued it before: there's some big privacy challenges hiding in the fabric of the internet and your browser.
Cookies are a big part of that and their privacy implications are broadly understood.
With any topic I usually like to take a step back, and understand the back story. So I was surprised to learn one of the primary motivations for designing browser-based cookies was, in fact, preserving privacy.
Pour a coffee ☕️, take a seat: learn how browser cookies were originally baked and when the intended use started to drift in this intriguing story by Steven Johnson:
Illustration: Karol Banach
Winning Privacy discussions as a Spotify playlist
Privacy is Serious Business and a rather complex topic. Adding some sweet juice (like pop culture) can help digest it a little easier.
So when there's a meme going around Twitter about clichés written out as "stories" in a Spotify playlist (where the titles of the songs make up the message to the audience) we thought to have a go at it as well.
Here's our version of Winning Privacy Discussions with STRM as a Spotify Playlist! 👇
That's it!
And... that's it for this week! We're close to releasing an easy interface for Data Subject Requests and RTBF's (if that data came over STRM-deployed pipelines) - making it much cheaper and faster to comply to them. And as we're all about privacy-by-design, you can run it all in your own cloud. In AWS a STRM deployment is directly installable already.
Let us know if you're interested!