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Michael Gaffney is president of Seawicks Candle Co. in Edgecomb.
Thirteen years ago, my wife and I started making candles in an old boathouse on our property in Edgecomb. We started selling hand-poured soy wax candles that we scented and packaged to evoke our favorite place in the world: the Maine coast. Today, we supply L.L. Bean, Holy Donut, Bixby Bars and Whole Foods, and our candles are also sold in 350 specialty stores nationwide. We’ve got a beautiful studio on the Kennebec River and just opened a flagship store in Boothbay Harbor.
Ours is a classic old-fashioned small-business success story, but it’s also a digitally powered small-business success story. That’s something I’d really like Maine lawmakers to understand and appreciate as they consider a bill called An Act to Create the Data Privacy and Protection Act, which admittedly sounds like a good thing, but would really hurt small businesses by undermining the way our digital advertising works.
As a small business with a tight budget, we have to ensure we advertise our specialty candles to only the right people. We can’t waste effort and money marketing cozy New England candles to folks who aren’t interested in the Maine coast. Digital advertising providers make it easy and inexpensive for us to reach the right audience. In this way, technology-powered relevant ads level the playing field, helping our little business stand out and compete with bigger players like Pottery Barn and Yankee Candle.
Our partners also have critical technologies we could never build or afford. They know if your phone is an Apple or Samsung, so they send you the right ad for your phone. If you got the wrong ad, you’d see a blank screen, and we’d pay for an undelivered ad — both bad results. Technology also tells us which ads consumers engage with more, so we can stop spending money on ads that don’t work and spend more on those that work well.
If legislators block these technologies, our ads will get delivered to the wrong people or to people who won’t even see them. We’ll also never know which ads work better, so we’ll keep wasting money trying to reach customers who never show up. Our sales will plummet as our costs increase. That’s a devastating one-two punch for a small business like ours.
We also want people to shop at our studio and store, and we plan to open more stores in the coming years. So, like other local businesses, it’s important that our advertising focuses on people nearby or who plan to visit our area. A dine-in pizza shop in a big city might only advertise to people within four blocks. A pizza delivery business might have customers within five miles. We advertise to people near our Boothbay shop and our studio, and we also reach people farther away because our studio can be a destination that people pair with other nearby activities. Most important for us is that the ads work. People often tell us they stopped in after seeing one.
If new legislation prevents us from limiting our advertising to people who are nearby, our brick-and-mortar operations will struggle, and we’ll think again before opening more stores.
People — and especially lawmakers — need to understand that when businesses like mine send you digital ads, it’s not because we’re spying on you. Business owners like me have no idea who’s seeing our ads, we just want to make sure that we’re spending our marketing dollars on ads that go to groups of people likely to be interested in buying our products or visiting our stores.
I understand that lawmakers in Augusta want to protect people’s privacy and sensitive data. That’s something we can all agree on. But if small businesses like mine can’t use basic data to find and advertise to the right people, send them the right ad, or know if our ads are working, it’ll be incredibly hard for us to compete against big national brands. If privacy legislation locks down data, it will be bad news for small local businesses, our economy and our communities. Maine legislators must do better.
