TSW, the Cookie Policy and the “online” Web Marketing Festival 2020

Like most of the events planned for 2020, the Web Marketing Festival had to rethink all the things that were taken for granted before COVID 19.

In this way the WMF2020 was born: in a totally digital format. And I must say they have been worthy representatives of the digital innovation they spread. For our part, as TSW we have been participating as a speaker since 2016 and we wanted to contribute to this change as well, describing our latest work experiences.

For this reason, we decided to go on stage at home, telling one of our most interesting projects, conducted in early 2020, entitled “Cookie policy: where UX and ADV meet” (if you like, you can hear us here, from 04:05:00).

The first thing we were pleased to hear were the complaints about the title. At the end of the speech they made us think that our speech had information on so many levels that it could have a title for each of them. We quote one, which we particularly liked (and we take this opportunity to thank Enrico Maioli): “Guerrilla Advertising User Test“. Makes sense. Or at least, a part of the idea. Giorgia and I were aware of the difficulty of being able to sum up in a few words a decidedly innovative test on many fronts. For this reason, we bring you back here what are the 3 main levels of reading from our point of view.

First level of reading: the output – The most performant Cookie Policy model

The first level of reading is the answer to customer’s need, a topic that is interesting for whoever has a website and deals with analytics/remarketing matters. In this case we identified the cookie policy format – compliant with the new GDPR – which allows to abide the regulation while collecting as much information as possible. We were able to identify it with a very effective method and, judging by the results in the field, extremely reliable. Compared to the starting condition (no longer compliant), we lost only 11% of the data. If we’d chosen one of the other hypotheses, we’d have half the data possible. Not bad.

Second level of reading: the method – The union between UX and ADV

Having an agency that offers all the digital services (and not only) has a great advantage: many points of view that can be integrated. And this is an unparalleled value. It was thanks to this that we were able to think and create a test that would evaluate the behaviour, in a real context, of a group of rather targeted people, difficult to reach, who voluntarily participated in our test, guided by an intrinsic motivation. We created ads through Google’s discovery campaigns, which fortunately we have been working with since last year (when they were still in beta testing) and we “simply” asked people to participate. We have internalized recruitment, using people’s likes/desires/behaviours.

Third level of reading – Our treasure

This time we used Google ads. Other times we used social sampling via Facebook. But it matters little the instrument itself. What surprised us was the response of the participants (more than 1,200 in less than 48 hours). Because if we see the timing, and the quality of the responses, we realize that there is a way to interact with our potential customers that is different from anything we have seen so far. There is no incentive. No special interactions. There are millions of people who dedicate time and resources to multiple activities. Think for example of the whole world of reviews. These are people who do it simply out of passion. Or maybe the idea of a “right” world in their heads. Well, if we can find these people, and put them in a position to respond, as we were able to do in this case, we are certain that we have found a treasure of inestimable value.

The article is the result of the collaboration with Giorgia Zambianchi.