Things are getting personal in California.

In a move that could strengthen California’s privacy laws, assumptions or “inferences” a company makes about someone based on their digital footprint are considered “personal information,” according to an opinion issued by California Attorney General Rob Bonta earlier this month, meaning that internally generated inferences about a consumer must be disclosed to Californians if requested.

The opinion has clarified and strengthened the “right to know” aspect of the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), signed into law in 2018 and put into effect on January 1, 2020, and is the first comprehensive privacy law at the state level in the country.

• California has since doubled down, with a ballot measure that passed in 2020, Proposition 24, or the Consumer Privacy Rights Act, which further strengthens the original law. It goes into effect in 2023.

Broadly speaking, the CCPA gives Californians the right to know what personal information is collected about them by businesses and how it’s used (advertising, it’s pretty much always advertising), giving them the opportunity to opt out of having it sold or shared. They can also request that it be deleted.

FWIW: The CCPA considers information that “could be reasonably linked, directly or indirectly, with a particular consumer or household” as personal. Crucially, data that is “deidentified” and “aggregate consumer information” is exempt.

Bonta’s opinion is written in response to a request made by California Assemblymember Kevin Kiley, who asked if a consumer’s right to know what info has been collected about them includes “internally generated inferences.”

According to Bonta’s interpretation of the law, the answer is yes. Under the CCPA, “inferences drawn from any of the information identified…to create a profile about a consumer reflecting the consumer’s preferences, characteristics, psychological trends, predispositions, behavior, attitudes, intelligence, abilities, and aptitudes” are defined as personal information and therefore must be disclosed to consumers if they ask.

Uh, in English: If a company knows you’re a 40-year-old Santa Monica resident shopping for sandals online and that most people between the ages of 35 and 50 in California who buy sandals also buy sunscreen, it can assume you might be interested in sunscreen and target you with a relevant advertisement. That assumption would be considered personal information under the CCPA.

It gets chilling quickly if you consider people searching for anything related to a medical condition, as a company could assume a person has diabetes based on their browsing history, “regardless of whether that’s true or not, because you as a customer don’t have insights into their algorithm,” said Ana Milicevic, principal and co-founder of Sparrow Advisers. “It’s a chain of powerlessness from a consumer perspective that’s propagating.”

Read the full story here.—RB

If you haven’t heard, the early 2000s are back. And the content machine won’t let us forget it. (Did someone call for a How I Met Your Mother reboot or a new Juicy sweatsuit?) While nostalgia is nothing new, brands seem to be all-in on bringing back the past to reach millennials. Perhaps it’s because studies have shown it makes us feel better (and…spend more money).

For experiential marketing, which faced a brief hiatus due to Covid, the nostalgia angle seems to be still alive and well. Great news for anyone who’s visited a Limited Too pop-up. Or, more recently, an Oreo/Blockbuster collab straight out of 2007.

Rewind the tape

If you thought Blockbuster was dead, you’d be a) in good company and b) wrong. There’s one left in the small city of Bend, Oregon, and it’s been there since 2000. Today, it’s known fittingly as “the last Blockbuster on Earth.” In 2020, the team at Airbnb teamed up with the owners to offer a one-night stay at the store.

In January, the team at Oreo decided to follow suit, taking over the space for a one-day event to mark the return of Oreo Cakesters, which were discontinued in 2012, two years before the video-rental chain ceased operations.

We spoke via email with Justin Parnell, VP of marketing & strategy at Oreo US, about how they pulled the event off and if it was a success. Read what he had to say here.—KH

The interest categories that Facebook creates for users so advertisers can target them are right about two-thirds of the time, according to researchers at North Carolina State University.

Released this week, their paper, clinically titled “Analyzing the Impact and Accuracy of Facebook Activity on Facebook’s Ad-Interest Inference Process,” found that 29% of the inferred interests Facebook “had listed for the study participants were actually not of interest,” according to the researchers.

How they did it: The group asked 146 study participants to download a Google Chrome browser extension that let the researchers collect and extract data from their accounts and see the interests Facebook was collecting about them. They then asked participants about how accurate those interests were.

• The results were similar to what the researchers observed in an experiment involving 14 Facebook accounts they created. In that experiment, they “found 33.22% of the inferred interests were inaccurate or irrelevant.”

Though based on user behavior, the researchers say the details of the algorithms creating these inferences “remain a black box.” But the team did note that Facebook doesn’t seem to take sentiment into consideration when collecting interests. For example, posting a negative comment on a Harry Potter page led to interests in…Harry Potter and Daniel Radcliffe.

So how bad are those numbers? Eh. Though based on a small sample size, recent research from Adalytics found that targeted ads across the web…maybe aren’t so great, either.—RB

There are a lot of bad marketing tips out there. These aren’t those.

Pop culture: Here’s why it should factor into your social media strategy this year. Go ahead and make that meme—although maybe not if it’s about the slap.

Pushback: How marketing leaders can beat four common internal objections.

Office vibes: Morning Consult recently published a report on what the “new normal” means for people’s “priorities, work preferences, and lifestyles.”

Creative collabs: We visited SXSW and learned all about how creativity and collaboration are the keys to making truly impactful work. Check out what we learned here.*

^{*This is sponsored advertising content.}

A report from UTA IQ, the United Talent Agency’s data and analytics division, sheds some light on how podcast listeners really feel about ads.

Bring it on: According to the report, which also includes podcast listening stats, nearly one-third of podcast listeners in the US are more open to hearing podcast ads than ads on other platforms or mediums.

That could be due to the nature of the relationship between podcast listeners and hosts: Nine in 10 listeners surveyed said they’re interested in celebs or influencers hosting podcasts, while two in five said listening to a celebrity or an influencer on a  podcast feels like listening to a friend.

DIY: Nearly one-third of US listeners think brands that create podcasts of their own—as opposed to just sponsoring or advertising on existing ones—are more culturally relevant.

UTA IQ conducted the survey in December among more than 8,000 US consumers ages 13–50, 6,000+ of whom listen to podcasts.

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Catch up on a few Marketing Brew stories you might have missed.

• More and more, brands are showing older women in ads
• Mood Board: A branded bodega grows in Brooklyn
• Yes, some brands made memes of the slap—were they in the wrong?