The buzz that GDPR has attracted is still far from over. Given the dramatic changes, the noise surrounding the implementation of any legislation that affects personal data is hardly surprising. However, its influence extends far beyond simple conversations surrounding data. The implications of GDPR are likely to have an impact on numerous industries, one of which is Digital Marketing.
A recent article in the Harvard Business Review discussed the impact that GDPR will have on this data-centric industry. This is quite simply because for a long time marketing companies have collected data on consumers to help identify what people want and who their potential customers could be. As a result of the new GDPR laws, marketing companies may not have access to the same insightful data, as a result, marketers will have to discover new ways to target digital ads, with less dependence on vast amounts of behavioural data.
Whats more, even outside of the EU, companies are likely to feel the effect. As
To get a better idea of what the future holds for digital marketing with the introduction of GDPR, we spoke with a number of experts within the fields of online data and digital marketing.
Shawn Ragell, the Marketing Manager at Pressboard, a platform for buying sponsored content says “I see GDPR as one of many steps the advertising industry as a whole is taking towards greater transparency and accountability. In the last year, we’ve seen top advertisers like Proctor & Gamble pull ad budgets from adtech solutions where there are valid concerns over where ads appear and how that data is reported. In a way, brand safety and consumer protection through the GDPR are two sides of the same coin.”
“That’s why we’ve made sure that brands using Pressboard can rest assured knowing that their content only appears on publications they choose to work with and that it’s GDPR compliant. Sponsored content is all about telling great stories, and storytelling is part of what makes us human, so I’m not worried about it going anywhere anytime soon” adds Ragell.
Kazu Takiguchi
Kazu Takiguchi, CEO and Founder of ReFUEL4, the world’s leading data-driven online ad creative management platform, believes that “companies, especially those in B2C, will likely see a dip in the number of contacts they can market to. On the flip side, their lists would only consist of high quality leads with a genuine interest in making a purchase. This is beneficial for the industry in the long run as marketers can be certain they are spending time, money and effort on prospects likely to give a high ROI, and audiences will no longer be bombarded by irrelevant ads with wayward targeting.”
For a more detailed account from a GDPR perspective, we spoke with Mircea Patachi, Cofounder and CEO of Clym, a Consent Lifecycle Management tool that helps you meet data protection obligations, who sees cookies playing a significant role in the future of GDPR and digital marketing.
Mircea Patachi
1. Cookies are something that “magically” gets in your browser. “That’s why most of the solutions for cookie management features “cookie scans” and there’s an entire fight about who scans better than others. What people seem to forget is that we, as data controllers, decide what cookies to install on users’ devices. That’s true both when we talk about first-party and third-party cookies. We decide what platform to use and in case of software developed in-house, what cookies we need. We also decide if we want to install Google Analytics, Doubleclick or Intercom (as examples only). There’s no magic,” claims Patachi.