Wake up and smell the consent!

Imagine the most financially-important marketing campaign of the year, the success of which affects every other campaign the brand undertakes for years to come.

Then picture the passion the creative team, marketing director, analysts and CEO would show to every part of the project. No lack of creative effort, agency expertise, analytical process, consumer testing or insight would be spared to guarantee success, because if it didn’t work the downstream impact would be hideous.

Now contrast this with the way brands develop permission statements.

Consider the lack of creativity, analysis and testing for this ‘legal chore’.

Most senior marketers (69% - source fast.MAP 2015 Data Elephant post-event surveys) do not even know the level of consent achieved by their current permission statement.

More than likely, it’s remained the same for years - a single message which is meant to encompass every type of customer and prospect. And probably, the creative team/ agency was never involved and does not regard it as part of its job.

The CEO’s overriding interest is that the statement be legally compliant. And it’s always been like this: Indeed, in my former life as a client I would discretely hide the opt-out statement to achieve higher levels of consent by making it more difficult for people to opt-out. The last thing brands wanted was to broadcast to consumers was the option of opting-out of marketing. Back then, it was a game of hide and seek rather than a marketing challenge.

How times have changed! Permission statements and the creativity and communication that surrounds them are the fulcrum through which brands gain consent to market. The two campaigns we imagined are now one and the same and this has harsh implications.

Every day, brands lose money because the considerable talent of their marketing team is not applied to this year’s most crucial marketing project.

fast.MAP (in collaboration with OPT4 via the Data Permission Benchmark ) has tested thousands of permission statements and knows that small differences in wording matter greatly. They really do!

And that’s not all. Once you have decided on the ‘proposition’ - marketing-speak for ‘the words’ - you then need to execute it creatively.

I’m on a mission to encourage marketers to think of consent as part of the marketing challenge and consider the most effective and engaging way to communicate it. What images could be used? Do you emphasise security or benefits? Control or trust? You can’t emphasise everything so you need to prioritise.

It’s a classic creative task. fast.MAP research has proved that small changes in the design of the form can also have a big impact on consent rate.

Consumers are now super-sceptical. In the hide-and-seek era, a small font-size was good. Now it has the reverse effect, because many people seek out and carefully investigate the permission statement to discover what they are committing to and small type makes it appear the organisation has something to hide.

These days, if you have something to say, you need to say it in a persuasive, confident way - or keep quiet.

My large-type memo to slothful marketers reads: ‘The game of hide and seek is over. Wake up and smell the consent!’

You may start to enjoy it.

If you enjoyed this blog then you may enjoy some others that I have published;

We must be sexist and ageist about consent bit.ly/1Ha2Etv

How good is your gut instinct? Can you spot the winning permission statement? bit.ly/1GJG729