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Continuing a series of short articles on the positive aspects of GDPR, I’d like to explore the benefits I think marketers are going to see from the regulation. In March, P&G’s CMO Marc Pritchard continued his long-fought assault on bad practice in the adtech industry. His focus on quality over quantity was working, he said, plus:
“This new level of transparency is shining the light on what’s next—marketers taking back control of our own destiny to accelerate mass disruption—transforming our industry from the wasteful mass marketing we’ve been mired in for nearly a century to mass one-to-one brand building fuelled by data and digital technology.”
Pritchard’s message has helped focus advertisers on delivering quality over quantity. But it’s not easy to achieve his goal of “mass one-to-one brand building fuelled by data and digital technology.”
However, the new requirements under GDPR - for companies to keep a record of the data they hold on their customers, plus acquire consent to access their devices – will serve to encourage this focus on quality, bringing Pritchard’s final goal closer for marketers as an industry standard.
One of the issues raised by GDPR for marketers is the need for businesses to gain unambiguous consent to access a consumer’s device – this not only means the advertiser will need consent, but also all of their marketing-partners, plus their partners’-partners’. All need to have collected consent for the same consumer, and all need to be individually disclosed to that consumer.
An important outcome of this is that marketers will have a much clearer understanding of who they are using in their technology stack – after all, they’ll have to disclose every one of them. The only real alternative is to simply work with full-service end-to-end platforms, increasing transparency of their adtech vendors.
To comply with some aspects of GDPR, many companies are beginning to look for ways to attach consumer data to a persistent ID that can be deleted. Persistent Identification is key to maintaining GDPR principles of consent and the right to erasure. Conveniently, creating a persistent ID is also the first step in communicating one-to-one over time – so, although it is only very early in the journey, I see GDPR as encouraging the market towards personalising communication over time.
Poor quality content will only serve to encourage consumers to withhold consent – why would a consumer opt-in to receive something that is of no value to them? As consent is a key factor for many in GDPR compliance, an increase in relevant, quality, branded content would be a natural outcome.
GDPR will, therefore, continue the process Marc Pritchard has started on the journey towards increasing transparency, relevancy and focusing on data-driven one-to-one marketing at scale.
Now, Pritchard’s goal is the same as Conversant’s – our fundamental belief is that brands should market one-to-one to individuals at scale, over time, to drive brand engagement that is measured against measurable incremental return - and our media technology was the first end-to-end solution to achieve this nearly a decade ago.
Finally, if you’re an advertiser or a publisher, then take a look at our free Consent Tool designed to gain GDPR compliant consent – it works with IAB Europe’s Transparency and Consent Framework.
