Why we created Licorice

Today you cannot visit any major industry publication without seeing a front-page story about the challenge of balancing privacy vs personalization. As consumers, too, we all have had experiences where we ask, “Wait, why does this company seem to know who my contacts are? Or why does that website I just visited already know my email address?” And we work in the industry - shouldn’t we know? One can only imagine what the everyday consumer thinks. 

Fortunately, we don’t need to imagine, since there is a lot of research out there detailing what consumers think about privacy, or more typically, the lack of it. Accenture, KPMG, Boston Consulting, Ernst & Young, and professors from Harvard, Virginia and IESE among others have all done research with results that share these two points: 1) users value personalization, but 2) breaching the trust a consumer places in companies not to share their data is difficult to repair.

Thinking there must be a better way, we asked ourselves “Why don’t we just ask consumers what they want? Couldn’t we make it easy enough for consumers but still valuable enough for marketers?” The more we dived into it, the more sense it made. Consumers could get personalized ads without sacrificing their privacy. Publishers could build better one-to-one relationships with their audiences and take charge over how they are monetized. Marketers could get the level of targeting and performance they have come to expect and perhaps even improve upon it (research shows that giving consumers more control over how their data is used increases their engagement with brands).

Why did we name it “Licorice”? Some people love it. Others think it’s gross. For that reason we thought it was a good example of something a consumer would probably prefer indicating themselves, especially when the alternative is being tracked around the web and having companies try to guess (and too often getting it wrong anyway).

Adam and Roland

August 2022