The #DeleteFacebook campaign may have reached fever pitch – but Facebook’s Q1 daily active users were up 13% over the previous year.
With performance like that, it is enough to make observers wonder, did the Cambridge Analytica scandal even happen?
That scandal, coupled with Europe’s new GDPR legislation, has put the digital marketing industries on notice – they are now being watched more closely to safeguard consumer data and to behave with more respect toward their privacy.
But, whilst the Facebook crisis may have seemed like it would shift user behavior, one tech exec doesn’t see that happening any time soon.
“We maybe need to demand things differently, but consumers aren’t going to band together and do that, the VP of digital at IBM.
“Maybe they’ll use some platforms a little bit less than they were before, but ultimately it’s probably not going to have a huge material change to the industry.”
That may sound counterintuitive to the recent storm that has swirled around the sector, with major changes expected after the drawing of a line in the sand.
But, whilst Facebook has suffered a reputational hit, it does not seem to have suffered from a user perspective.
That’s because Bitterman thinks consumer will still engage knowledgable and maturely in a value exchange that has existed for some years now.
“It’s changed in that there’s a lot more option in terms of how you might want to transact, for lack of a better term, with a publisher,” he says. “But we still haven’t seen any critical mass changes. There’s been no major shifts.
“Most of us still consume our media through a social contract which is, ‘You serve me ads, I give you my data, those ads are being powered by the data that I’ve given you and we all generally know that consciously or unconsciously’.”
This video is part of a series titled The Consumer First, a New Era in Digital Media presented by MediaMath. For more from the series, please visit this page.
