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Twitter Data Dash

Twitter recently announced the launch of its new privacy policy with an innovative online game called “Twitter Data Dash,” conceived and directed by YML, and designed by Momo Pixel. The interactive, 8-bit style game was built to educate and engage Twitter’s global audience of 330M users around the importance of one’s privacy on the platform.

YML’s innovative approach has so far earned press from The Washington Post, The Verge, TechCrunch, Adweek, and an array of other publications.

“Few topics are as relevant today as privacy for both businesses and consumers alike, which is why we leapt at the opportunity to partner with Twitter and disrupt the category,” shared Ashish Toshniwal, YML’s CEO and co-founder.

When Twitter first reached out to us, Twitter’s Privacy and Design team was underway rethinking and rewriting their privacy policy so it presented itself to people as something other than a massive, relentless sledgehammer of text. They began by thoughtfully breaking it down. Structurally. Visually. Linguistically crafting in a way that no longer required you to acquire a Harvard law degree to understand.

Twitter brought in YML to deliver product innovation, and in less than three months, “Twitter Data Dash” was born, built, and launched.

“We quickly gravitated toward the idea of turning privacy — something people go out of their way to avoid — into something you’d be genuinely excited to look at, interact with, and share,” added Craig Kind, the YML Creative Director who led the project.

Formatted for mobile and browser, we spearheaded “Twitter Data Dash” from definition right through to final artwork, development and design. A feat that included both customizing in-game artwork and regionalizing the experience for 9 major languages.

The game itself brings the Twitterverse to life in 8-bit style. From a building in the form of a hashtag to a boat under water with a mast featuring the Twitter bird icon to stylized Internet trolls, we dove deep into the nuance and culture of Twitter and reflected it in “Twitter Data Dash.”

The game pays meticulous detail to accessibility, globalization, and characters with diverse backgrounds. That narrative was woven into the foundation of the game when we partnered with Momo Pixel, a visionary 8-bit artist, game developer, and designer whose work has already changed the industry, using the medium to comment on the black female experience in “Hair Nah”.

Momo Pixel, the artist who designed the game, shared, “Games are a great way to facilitate learning, so when Twitter and YML approached me with the opportunity to build a video game that can help make their privacy policy easier to understand, it was a no-brainer — I absolutely said yes!”

“Twitter Data Dash” is hosted on a website built by YML’s engineering team, which facilitated the technical architecture across YML, Twitter and Momo Pixel over the three month project. YML consistently ran usability and testing, QA, responded to daily changes of the experience, and ensured the experience was consistently fast and reliable across platforms.

Twitter’s business objective — our goal— was to design an experience that tackled a massive global problem in a way nobody ever had before. Launched less than a month ago, the game—and the subject of privacy—have been featured in countless major publications worldwide, and played by millions of people around the globe.

Making Hot Dogs Out of Probabilistic Data

The amount of deterministic, high-quality data available in the marketplace, such as the self-declared information on your LinkedIn profile, has always been scarce and expensive. Demand for probabilistic 3rd party data, which assumes information about you based on articles you’ve read, was born in the shadow of that scarcity, and 3rd party cookies, that facilitate cross domain tracking offered cheap scale. Inevitably, the consequence of that scale was a compromise in quality, as algorithms generated an abundance of probabilistic data for marketers to act on. The problems started when speculative data became the go-to for campaign insights, usurping the higher-quality data that fuels better marketing.

I like to use an analogy to the food industry. The amount of pricy solid-cut chicken and beef did not rise at the same rate as the total food available in the marketplace. To meet increasing demand, food processors found ways to turn 1kg of chicken breast into 5kg of “food” in the form of hotdogs, taco meat, and nuggets by mixing it with a cheap volume of corn, skin, gums, and sodium. Marketers have been making hotdogs by mixing strong, consented first-party data with high-volume (and affordable) probabilistic data, ultimately cheapening the effectiveness of their platforms.

The internet, as we know it today, is a consequence of the value marketers put on targeting people based on speculative, processed data, with little regard to where the ads are displayed. The humble 3rd party cookie, which allows cross-domain tracking of people by hundreds of data aggregators, is the mechanism that enabled that cheap scale. Why pay $20 CPM on the New York Times when you can target people who have visited the NYT on some unknown site for a dollar? In other words – why pay $5 for a 1kg chicken breast when you can get 5kg of hotdogs for the same price?

Working with Audience Scarcity

As a B2B media company that helps thousands of businesses connect to their niche professional audiences, Multiview is well accustomed to dealing with audience scarcity. Finding the right people on quality media is the name of the game, but quality data that identifies professional audiences is scarce and expensive. Using data manipulation to create scale in B2B can easily result in a big waste of media dollars: algorithms designed to get scale can easily consider a person who’s searching for a ‘chair’ in the abundant broader category of ‘People in market for furniture’, which may sometimes be a legitimate tactic. However, that logic fails if a person is looking for something highly specialized, such as a ‘dentist chair’, for which the available data is very scarce. Challenging a scale algorithm to target people who search for ‘dentist chair’ could easily result in wasted media dollars spent on people who search for any piece of furniture or are looking for a dentist.

There is no doubt that the loss of 3rd party cookies creates the perception of loss of accuracy, scale, and transparency, but I would argue that what we are set to gain is more than what we are set to lose, because 3rd party data was never as good as the hype, just as processed food will never be better than a chicken breast.

As a brand, the best data you have is the data you collect through direct relationships with people – think of it as raising your own chicken. The second-best option is to buy data and media directly from trusted publishers, like buying chickens from a local farmer you know by name.

Knowing that, marketers should focus on three things as they prepare for the party after the cookiepocalypse:

1. Getting Control Over 1st Party Data. Collect only what you need and do it consensually, while keeping it secure and current. Strike direct relationships with quality publishers that have direct relationships with their readers.
2. Wean Yourself Off the Thought Data is More Important Than Placement. And tighten your whitelist. Cheap scale is only for brands that have budgets to burn. It doesn’t matter how good your data is if you use it to buy an ad placement on an alarm clock app.
3. Remember That at the End of the Day It is More About What You Say, Than Where You Say It or to Whom. No data or savvy media strategy can supplant the great creative ideas needed to fuel modern marketing.

Life after the third-party cookie may be different, perhaps less convenient, and perhaps more expensive – but the detritus it will clear from the marketing stack will be better for clients and for internet users.

A comprehensive digital analytics strategy is vital to running a successful business today. The problem is — it’s not easy to get right. It’s complicated. But it doesn’t need to be. Here are four common problems and solutions to deal with them:

1. Your website or app doesn’t convert as well as you think it should.

You have built what you think is a good website or app after months of planning and development. You have put some marketing dollars behind it to increase acquisition, and you are seeing more people visiting your website or app than ever before. The problem is, they’re not converting as well as you think they should. New users are visiting and not buying your product, service, or signing up for your membership program.

Using tools like Google Optimize or Optimizely can let your users ‘vote’ between two or more options by how they use your website and permanently implement the options they like best. For example, your organization likes a white ‘Buy Now’ button, but your users buy more when the button is blue. You can now make that data-driven informed decision, and everybody wins! Improvement is an iterative process, and we help identify where the friction is and how to optimize those areas with your collaboration.

2. You can’t tell the difference between web and digital analytics.

It is important to understand the difference between web and digital analytics and the importance of each source or platform in a digital strategy. A customer will interact with your brand through many different avenues; from email to search to social, each digital channel serves a purpose in interacting with your existing and prospective customers. Web and app also have their unique attributes and must be approached differently as well as holistically.

A customer could interact with a company’s website and its app over their lifecycle, so why treat them as being two different user profiles? By using Google Analytics/Firebase Analytics you can integrate and build robust cross-device and cross-platform measurement plans for web and app platforms, helping to ensure strategies are customer-led.

3. You genuinely don’t know your customers.

Many businesses still don’t know the complete journey a customer takes once they visit their website or app before converting or what prevents a prospective user from converting. In terms of your business’s analytics maturity, you still might be stuck in the descriptive analytics phase and only able to answer questions like ‘What happened?’ but not why it did. It is important to be adaptive with your approach and understand the changing consumer landscape, as customers visit through a growing number of channels and don’t always take the path we want them to take.

With one of GALE’s ecommerce clients, we performed analyses to identify which key pages a customer visits on websites before they convert and where they fall out of the funnel to better understand how their customers interact with their platform. By understanding the most important pages to a user, we were able to set up a paid media strategy around driving users to these pages.

4. You don’t know what story to tell with your data.

You have tracking on your website or app, data is coming into your Google or Adobe Analytics console, and you begin reporting on some metrics you think are your KPIs. But there is no story, just a series of disjointed summary metrics. This could be for a few reasons: your implementation is filled with errors or incorrect data, you don’t know what these metrics say about your website, or you don’t have enough information to create a clear picture.

All data has a story to tell, but you need the right storyteller to extract it, interpret it, and communicate it effectively. It’s important to take time to understand the business, map out the critical interactions a user makes on your website or app, and create a robust plan to get the data you need to share it in a way that tells a story about your users.

Digital Analytics should be, and will continue to be, a part of your organization’s core decision-making tools. We’re continuing to reach further stages of Analytics Maturity as your ‘Good’ digital analytics strategy has become ‘Not Good Enough’ in a few short years. It’s time to be proactive and take control of your future.