Permissioned Data Is a First-Party Data Lever with Colleen Barry of Ketch
I sat down with Colleen Barry at Shoptalk Fall in Nashville. Colleen is Chief Marketing Officer at Ketch.
“Ketch is a data privacy and permission per permissioning software company,” she says.
Twenty Plus States
Consumer privacy as an industry started with GDPR in Europe in 2016. Colleen pointed to the US state laws that followed, CCPA first, with twenty plus states now holding privacy laws. AI adds a new worry, consumer data flowing into the models that train on it.
Enforcement Arrived
CCPA took effect in 2021, and Colleen said the money now flowing into privacy follows enforcement, which regulators have only started.
“Only this year have we seen big enforcements come down on Disney and Healthline Media and Honda,” she says.
Those cases centered on opt-out practices, whether a consumer can say no to data collection. Consumers are also sending more requests to see or delete their data, which puts pressure on the pipeline to the CRM.
From the Cookie Banner to the Ad Audience
A Ketch rollout starts with consent management, the cookie banner and a preference center. Phase two sends those permission signals to the systems, apps and AI models that use the data.
Colleen flagged a gap marketers miss. A reject all click can stop the tags from firing, and the consumer’s data still sits in a Facebook audience or another ad audience.
“You have to not just stop those active tags from firing, but reach into those systems and get the data from the consumer that opted out,” she says.
The payoff is ad spend that stops reaching people who opted out. I asked whether that makes Ketch a catch all for this data, and she said she liked it, with no royalty.
Consent in Context
No US state privacy law requires the cookie banner pop-up. It came over from GDPR and European rules, and it became the default because it is the easiest way to give notice.
That leaves room to ask for consent where it makes sense, at the point of entry from a social ad or at checkout. Colleen thinks a shopper who always clicks reject all might say yes to a relevant question in the moment.
“Instead of thinking about privacy as, ugh, my legal team made me do this, you can actually think about it as a we have to do this, it’s a necessary evil. How can we implement it in a way that gets us more permission data?” she says.
AI Slop and Critical Thinking
Her definition of AI slop is output from LLMs that nobody applied critical thinking to.
“At a glance it looks so polished, but then you start reading and you’re like, This is direk, this is it doesn’t actually mean anything,” she says.
She told me about building a skill to speed up editing her head of product’s blog drafts, and realizing it shortchanged her own understanding of the topic. I shared mine, a skill I call Brentify that has Claude check every paragraph against my own language and gives me a score at the end.
The Biggest List or the Best List
Colleen’s hot take is for marketers who avoid privacy because they fear it will cut their data collection.
“Do I want the biggest list or do I want the best list, right?” she says.
If a consumer does not want the marketing or the personalization, the data has little value to begin with, and the technology now makes privacy another lever in first-party data collection.
Learn more about Ketch at ketch.com, and find Colleen on LinkedIn.