CANNES — For years, the advertising industry has often viewed data privacy compliance as a cost of doing business, a limiter on marketers’ ambitions.
But could privacy be a competitive advantage? This was the consensus from a panel of executives from Kroger, Intuit, Lyft, and LiveRamp.
Interviewed by Tameka Kee at a LiveRamp-hosted event in Cannes, they argued that building a privacy-first posture around genuine consumer benefit is the key to unlocking the “carrot” of customer loyalty and business growth.
- Nick Hamilton, SVP, Head of Technology, Kroger Precision Marketing
- Dave Raggio, VP, Intuit SMB MediaLabs, Intuit
- Ted Flanagan, VP, Customer Success & Solution Engineering, LiveRamp
- Shane Dwyer, Head of Sales, Lyft Media
Trust is the non-negotiable currency
Shane Dwyer, head of sales for Lyft Media, argued that without it, neither the core rideshare service nor its nascent media business could function. The company is now carefully building an advertising model on what he calls the “locational transaction,” which he views as a new kind of cookie.
“The value exchange at Lyft or at any rideshare platform is you’re providing your data… your first name, your last name, your email, your phone number, and most specifically your location,” Dwyer said. “This level of trust that matters so much to us right now, that without trust Lyft Media doesn’t exist. Honestly, without trust, our business doesn’t exist.”
This principle also applies to established players like Kroger, which has been leveraging first-party purchase data for decades. Nick Hamilton, SVP and head of technology for Kroger Precision Marketing, explained that personalized offers based on shopping history avoid being “creepy” by delivering clear, tangible value.
“We’ve been doing personalization for 20 years,” Hamilton said. “It’s all about, are we making customer’s lives easier?”
The longest pull is not technology
For Intuit’s Dave Raggio, successful technology partnerships depend on simplicity. With a suite of products like QuickBooks at the heart of many small businesses, any potential partner must be able to explain its data mechanisms in a way that non-specialists on his privacy team can understand.
“When we start getting into cookies and hash emails and all these different types of things, it becomes a blocker, really,” said Raggio, VP of Intuit SMB MediaLabs. “The most successful ones and the quickest moving ones are the ones that can explain it cleanly and easily.”
Ultimately, the biggest hurdle to creating a more collaborative and interoperable advertising ecosystem is not technological, according to Kroger’s Hamilton. The real brake on progress, he argued, is legal fragmentation and inconsistent interpretations of privacy regulations.
“When every state is doing something different, when every legal team is seeing something different, they want their same red lines. In my mind that is the harder challenge, the longest pull versus technology,” he stated. “Technology is moving so fast, the solutions are moving so fast.”
You’re watching “The Beet.TV Leadership Sessions at Cannes Lions 2025, presented by LiveRamp” For more videos from this series, please visit this page.
You’re watching The Beet.TV Leadership Sessions at Cannes Lions 2025, presented by LiveRamp. For more videos from this series, please visit this page. You can find all of our coverage from Cannes Lions 2025 here.
