Online Viewing Rooms Are Creating a Goldmine of User Data on Art Collectors. Here’s How Galleries Are Using It—and How They Could in the Future

Since the art world’s widespread
physical shutdown triggered a flood of online viewing
rooms, much of the industry’s attention has been
directed toward typical sales reports and heartening progress on
price transparency. At this point, we can safely say two things:
that business is still being done in the depths of the crisis; and
that the average observer has never before had more visibility into
the availability of artworks and their costs. These are inherently good things.

The trade’s step into e-commerce
also means that another valuable commodity is being exchanged at an
unprecedented rate, even when no artworks art being sold: user
data. In contrast to decades worth of data-gathering in the auction
sector (let alone the larger sphere of online retail), private art
dealers have lagged far behind on this front. 

But the great data gold rush of 2020 might
just lead galleries and fairs into a long-overdue era of
quantitative analysis—that
is, assuming the transition is handled conscientiously and
strategically.

To slash a clear path through
this thorny thicket of technological and legal questions, our
trusty art business editor has assembled a handy Q&A in plain
English (with a dash of good humor) so that even total beginners
can get a sense of how to navigate this terrain. 

OK Egghead, What Information Can Galleries and Fairs Collect
About Me Right Now? 

That depends partly on the law
in your country of residence, and partly on you. 

A growing body of state,
national, and international laws restricts companies’ abilities to
profile users based on their browsing activity without their
consent. The most prominent of these is the European Union’s
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). While it is technically
an EU law for EU-based companies, any online platform in any
country can run afoul of GDPR if that platform violates the rights
of an EU citizen—which is why every website in existence had to be
retrofit for compliance before the regulation went into force in
May 2018. 

According to Kenneth Mullen, a
partner at the international law firm Withersworldwide, the core
purpose of GDPR is to ensure that online retailers “only collect
the amount of data needed to fulfill their lawful
purposes” via transparent collection
practices. Moreover,
companies are legally allowed to preserve information about a user only as long
as it’s needed. GDPR also prevents retailers from sharing user data
with others unless there are “legal safeguards in place to ensure
it’s only used for purposes that the customer reasonably
expects.”

But that still leaves more
wiggle room than you might think.

Translation, Please?

Here’s the good news: Thanks to
GDPR, the California Consumer Privacy
Act, and similar laws
elsewhere, every website (including every online viewing room)
offers a privacy policy that outlines each type of data being
gathered from you, how it’s being gathered, which third parties it
may be shared with, and to what ends—as well as (under certain
conditions) the process by which you can procure a copy of all your
personal data, restrict its being sharing with others, and/or
demand its wholesale deletion.

Here’s the less-good news: As a
representative example, David Zwirner’s privacy policy swells to
over 2,000 words. For reference, that’s about the max I can submit
to my very patient editors without them looking at me like I just
dumped a bubbling cauldron of salsa on their favorite rug.
[Editor’s note: this one is just over 2,300 words, but it gets
a pass.]

Which means basically none of us
ever reads these things. As a result, we tend to hand websites
permission to harvest additional info as eagerly as we would hand
our celebrity crushes our phone numbers. 

Wait, I’m Voluntarily Giving Out Extra Data to Art Dealers?
How?

You know that pop-up window
asking if you consent to the use of “cookies” whenever you visit a
website for the first time? Cookies are files downloaded to your
device that hold a tiny amount of info about you and/or the website
you’re visiting. The second you blindly click “OK” or “Approve,”
you’re agreeing to install “non-essential” cookies that deliver
data about your browsing activity to the website
owner. 

Oh… Well, What Kind of Data Do These Cookies
Deliver?

They do things like track users’
movements from page to page on their websites, log which items a
user clicks on, and record the amount of time spent on each page.
All of this data offers potentially valuable insights into consumer
behavior. But the key is that none of it is actually linked to consumers’
identities. 

“The purpose of the data is to
make correlations,” explains Penny Gillespie, vice president of
research at the multinational business-intelligence firm Gartner.
Analyzing data “can
lead to personalized experiences without knowing the customer,
which ultimately leads to greater conversion and even cross-sell
and upsell opportunities.” You just have to achieve sufficient
scale with the anonymized data first.

Uh, Do I Have to Go to Business School, Or Can You Clarify
That With an Example? 

Please allow me to save you two
years and about $100,000.

Imagine your website sells
women’s clothing, and you’ve had 200,000 potential shoppers search
your site with the phrase “black dress.” That almost
infinitely variable term may not mean much alone.
But based on which
search results users actually click on, it becomes clear that what
most people intend to find is a black cocktail dress. Based on that data, your engineers can
tweak the search algorithm to prioritize black cocktail dresses for
any new search for “black dress” going forward. 

This is where it gets
interesting, as Gillespie shows by continuing the example to its
endpoint: 

“Over time, I also learn that
the intent of the customer is not just to buy a black dress (or
even cocktail dress), but rather to buy an ensemble for a wedding
or black-tie event. Then, when the customer searches for ‘black
dress,’ I show a black cocktail dress in the context of an event
(wedding, gala, etc.) and have an opportunity to sell the customer
an entire outfit (dress, shoes, bag, jewelry, undies, makeup,
etc.).”

So Galleries Are Doing This Kind of Anonymized Trend
Analysis Now? 

They’re starting to, often with
the help of art fairs or other partners. 

According to a spokesperson, Art
Basel will provide
exhibitors in the June iteration of its online viewing rooms with
“basic analytics on the number of page views per room, as well as
per artwork, while exploring further possibilities.” Dealers in the
inaugural Frieze online viewing room earlier this month received
aggregated information on which works in their digital booths
received the most views, and for how long. 

Similarly, a David Zwirner
spokesperson confirms that the gallery has been relaying to the
dealers making use of its Platform initiative
some overall visitor metrics, including total page views, average
time spent on site, and the number of users hailing from each city
or country represented. Sotheby’s will also share anonymized data,
such as the number of visits and page views, to members of the
auction house’s recently launched Gallery Network.

But again, the central point
here is that all of this information is nameless and faceless. It
only allows dealers to make inferences about which artists and
works generally make the strongest first impression (by provoking a
click), best sustain viewers’ interest (by extending time spent on
each page), and ultimately incite some kind of action (such as an
email inquiry or, on Sotheby’s Gallery Network, placing a work
under $150,000 in your virtual shopping cart). 

Are Dealers Doing Anything More Targeted and
Personalized?

Officially, the answer appears
to be “not really,” but the ingredients are in place to change that
if and when policies and priorities allow.

Zwirner’s Platform and the
Sotheby’s Gallery Network don’t require users to submit any
identifying info at all to view the works on offer. But other
initiatives do, and that would be the starting
point. 

Art Basel’s online viewing
rooms, for example, are only accessible after users log into their
Art Basel accounts, which means putting their first and last names
and a valid email address on file. Frieze requires a name, email
address, and telephone number (though the number is only used to
verify registration); and unlike Platform, Zwirner’s own online
exhibitions can only be unlocked by providing an email
address, which is relatively
standard practice among galleries of all sizes.

This identifying information
could empower dealers to begin building individual
profiles of users’ tastes based on their browsing activity. But
everyone I spoke to for this story emphasized that, in adherence to
GDPR and other privacy laws, they are strictly gathering the
aggregated (meaning, anonymized) data discussed
earlier. 

Do Galleries Ever Get Data Linked to a Specific
Customer? 

Pretty much only when users send
direct email inquiries about specific works. In Art Basel’s online
viewing rooms, users can provide additional data points about
themselves (most notably, their VIP status with the fair), but only
if they wish. Otherwise, the dealer they reach out to only receives
their name and email.

It’s a similar story when
visitors to the Frieze online viewing room sign a gallery’s virtual
guest book. At that point, their name and registered email are
supplied to the dealer in question (who must then only use them in
accordance with online privacy regulations). And of course,
individual galleries get the same information from direct inquiries
on their own in-house platforms.

“Everyone wants to know who the customer is
because the experience can be even more personalized,” Gillespie
says. But for now, the art
market doesn’t appear to be taking the next step by building
profiles of specific users, which is the Excalibur of smart online
retail.

What Would User-Specific Personalization Look Like for the
Online Art Market? 

We can get some clues by
leveling up the “black dress” example from earlier. Instead of
simply intuiting that an anonymous user is searching for wedding
attire and responding with semi-tailored options, a specific
customer’s browsing (and buying) history on the same site could be
mined to serve up wedding fits from their favorite brands, styles,
price points, and more—all
in real time, so that the
site is further personalized with each new click.

The next logical upgrade is to
implement personalization engines that would enable this type of
customization for private art dealers. Rather than give every
collector the same grid of available works in the same order, or
ask them to filter lists of artists themselves, algorithms could
automatically sequence online viewing rooms to prioritize specific
artists (or types of artists), media, or price ranges according to
what each particular
user has preferred in
the past. 

That feature might not seem
especially useful in, say, a single small gallery’s viewing room
featuring 10 or so works by one artist. But its utility increases
dramatically for a mega-gallery showcasing dozens of works by
multiple artists at once—and
exponentially for an online art fair offering thousands of works by
hundreds of artists in dozens of galleries. 

Technologically Speaking, How Far Away Are We From That
Future? 

General retailers are basically
there now. Gillespie has already reviewed case studies for various
personalization engines, and says the results are “typically
impressive” and generate meaningful return on investment “within
months.” 

I just can’t tell you whether
any dealers, art fairs, or auction houses are seriously exploring
the possibilities. Either
fittingly or ironically for a story about data permissions, no one
I spoke to for this story was particularly keen on getting into
specifics about the future. The best I can do is relay that they’re
all using both quantitative analysis and good old-fashioned
qualitative feedback from customers and exhibitor-partners to
enhance their future offerings. 

Is Data Collection and Analysis an Arena Where the Biggest,
Richest Players Have a Huge Advantage Over the Little
Guys? 

Yes and no. According to
Gillespie, a stark divide between haves and have-nots used to be
the default in the wider retail realm, but now “more sophisticated
technology is being brought to the masses.” 

Case in point: many retailers
long ago opted out of using their own proprietary software to
analyze the aggregated data we’ve already discussed. Art Basel uses
Google Analytics to dissect the traffic in its online viewing
rooms, and given Google’s prominence in the field, I’ll bet you a
pallet of exorbitantly priced black-market Clorox wipes that our
Swiss friends aren’t the only ones in the private market doing so.
Why build something (likely) worse from scratch if you can plug and
play a better toolkit from a trusted expert for a reasonable
fee?

The same basic calculus appears
in personalization engines: individual companies can either try to
develop their own tools and unpack the data themselves, or they can
pay for third-party technology, expertise, and analysis. Ditto for
the types of robust cybersecurity measures needed to safeguard
sensitive user data, especially for online viewing rooms linked to
an actual payment and fulfillment apparatus. In all cases, just be
advised that the results and prices of these services will
vary.

That’s a Lot to Digest. What’s the Big
Takeaway? 

Whether we’re talking about the
anonymized trend analysis available today, or the real-time
personalized experience achievable in the future,
online dealers need to collect
large amounts of data before it becomes especially useful. Right
now, that’s much more achievable for a Frieze or a David Zwirner
than it is for a single-location basement gallery hoping to break
through online. 

Which means that thriving on the
frontier of user data still comes down to fundamental questions
about who your audience is, how engaged they are with your digital
platform, and how long any dealer or fair can stick around to learn
from them. Those aren’t new lessons; online viewing rooms and their
associated data discoveries just make them newly
relevant.

The post Online Viewing Rooms Are Creating a Goldmine of
User Data on Art Collectors. Here’s How Galleries Are Using It—and
How They Could in the Future appeared first on artnet
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