That exchange can be even more subtle. Mastercard built a free application designed to help Ukrainian refugees find the best place in Poland to start their new lives. Rajamannar said users of that app thanked Mastercard with more business, even though Mastercard didn’t explicitly advertise.
“We never said that you buy your Mastercard, then you will get this,” he said. “And then without saying anything, they’re actually paying us back.”
New challenges
For several years, there have been new regulations and tech platform policies limiting the use of data in advertising. But there are new ways advertisers might once again encroach too far in consumers lives.
For one, artificial intelligence requires tons of data to work, which could lead to more collection, Beebe said.
“You have to point the AI not at extracting nuanced signals from massive quantities of data, but using the limited data that you have to make predictions about the nonaddressable space,” Beebe said.
Moreover, Rajamannar predicted that more regulation will emerge to stop brands from pushing consumers to buy things they don’t really want.
“Are we nudging consumers to buy more? And is that good for the consumers? Is it good for the environment, from a sustainability point of view, if we are using their data to push something to them,” Rajamannar said. “That is very much a privacy topic.”