Imagine you’re hosting a summer soiree at your home and in order to ensure food, décor, and music are all taken care of you hire some vendors. Although the soiree is seemingly running smoothly, unexpected issues arise.
When the lights go out, the DJ admits that he hired a different lighting guy who disappeared when the party started and now the repair guy is asking for cash up front. While the dinner was great, the dessert is awful and it turns out your caterer outsourced without telling you. But worse still, after the party you learn that the lighting repair guy stole a guest’s camera!
Despite being the host, you actually have little visibility into what’s going on behind the scenes and the risks to which you and your guests could be exposed. These are the risks you are exposed to when you not only employ vendors directly but when they outsource the job to yet more vendors.
This is an analogy of the “Marketing Cloud” of vendors on your websites, apps, and other online content that offer lots of benefits but also create risk. The recent hack into Taboola’s widget on Reuters.com demonstrated that; “websites need to think long and hard not only about the security of their own servers, but whether the companies who are providing widgets and plugins that power the websites are taking security as seriously themselves.” Vendors, like ad servers, video tools, analytics tools, data targeters, and social media widgets can cause security risks, data leakage and site latency. Most ecommerce sites actually only have direct relationships with 20% of the vendors that have access to their customers. That’s right, Ghostery research indicates that 80% of the digital vendors – or tags – are placed on a company’s site indirectly and are often brought through a chain of redirects, making them difficult for the enterprise to identify. Often, the risks that these additional vendors bring to your site, such as site latency, data leakage and security breaches, outweigh the benefits promised.
Let’s take a look at why this happens and how to solve it:
CMO-CIO disconnect
The CMO has a big budget to spend on media, but unknowingly, much of the media spend actually goes towards technology, which is largely unmanaged by the enterprise – creating a complex marketing cloud. While including the IT department in vendor management would help, IT is perceived as slowing down marketing and focusing more on cost savings rather than progress. These conflicting departmental goals make it difficult to align strategies to enhance the overall consumer experience and engagement. Marketing may outspend IT on technology in a few years, but just 1% of surveyed C-suite executives see CMOs as responsible for digital innovation in their organisations, illustrating the disconnection across departments.
Lack of a single digital owner
Tags get placed throughout a site by various departments, causing latency and data leakage. All of these issues impact the user experience and can result in revenue loss. A single marketing tag on a site has been shown to increase the page latency by an average of 5%. Each vendor that has access to your site gains access to your customer data as well and this unauthorised access enables vendors to sell it directly to your competitors undetected. An average retailer shares 72% of the same digital vendors with its competitor, making it highly vulnerable to such leakages. Without strict vendor management across departments, it is hard to mitigate marketing cloud risks.
CMOs and CIOs who work together on Marketing Cloud Management can achieve higher performance and greater transparency. That ultimately leads to more revenue, greater market share, and higher profits! MCM sits above the fray to provide a holistic view into the impacts of each one of the vendors placed on a brand’s site – both directly and indirectly. MCM empowers the entire enterprise to better evaluate the risks and returns of these vendors, and their effects on operational costs, site performance, and data leakage.
It also enables enterprises to:
● See all the vendors on their site to determine which are necessary or redundant
● Control exactly which vendors have access to the company’s data to protect against customer poaching
● Prevent breaches by keeping your data secure and out of your competitors’ hands
● Identify and fix vendors that are impacting a website’s latency and performance
● Benchmark your performance against the industry or other competitors
Without a process in place or a designated leader for vendor selection, a number of issues can arise. Ultimately, your website’s security is only as good as that of the vendors on your site. As incidents like Taboola and a loss of consumer confidence become increasingly prevalent, having a Marketing Cloud Management solution in place will become as imperative for brands as driving sales and operational efficiency.
By Scott Meyer, CEO of Ghostery Inc.
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