Kristina Knight from BizReport speaks to aqfer Founder Daniel Jaye on the impact of GDPR after the first 5 months.
It’s been five months since the European GDPR rules went into effect, changing how businesses collect, store, and use consumer data. Though it is specific to European brands, many businesses throughout the world have implemented GDPR-friendly practices in anticipation of a broader application. One expert identifies how GDPR has performed in the first five months.
Kristina: What has the initial impact of GDPR been on the market?
Daniel Jaye: The real impact has been felt in two ways: Direct impact on ad revenue/spend based on data availability.
This impact has been varied: some large media companies have taken a conservative approach and as a result have seen third-party demand for EU inventory drop by 25-50 percent. However, a surprising majority of smaller EU publishers and websites appear to be ignoring the new regulations – the question will be how long before that changes when enforcement truly begins.
In other cases, policy changes from vendors that have undermined specific business models. For example, Google has redacted unique IDs from its log-level data feeds, basically crippling many independent attribution and analytic business models.
KK: Will GDPR affect consolidation in the industry?
DJ: For some companies, the triple threat of GDPR reductions in data availability, Safari ITP data restrictions, and reduced availability of investment capital will be an accelerator. Separately, companies that have newer technologies that have been built with strong end-to-end data governance and provenance capabilities will be attractive acquisition targets for companies whose legacy technology is slow to adapt.
KK: How can marketers have the confidence to know their data is GDPR compliant?
DJ: Ask your vendor for detailed reporting on positive consent, broken out by the audience, source, etc. This will require actual audit-level analytics to see where consent was recorded or received via standards like IAB consent vectors.
KK: What should marketers do to ensure they’re thinking about GDPR early on versus as an afterthought?
DJ: Privacy by Design is a requirement of GDPR and has been a best practice for companies whose businesses rely on consumer data. With Privacy by Design, companies perform privacy impact assessments (PIA’s) before any material undertaking and evaluate how best to meet the various requirements – minimalization, security, etc.
KK: Will GDPR change how data privacy is viewed?
DJ: Companies can no longer take a minimalist approach to privacy compliance. While it’s true that in the short term GDPR enforcement lacks resources and solid guidelines, this will change.
KK: Have you seen any unintended consequences from GDPR?
DJ: Certainly Google’s redaction of identifiers from their data is having a significant impact on third-party reporting and analytics. In general, we see an anti-competitive impact as the larger players (Google and Facebook) use GDPR as an excuse to reduce collaboration with third-party data and solution providers, forcing customers to work directly with the duopoly instead.
This post was adapted from the article originally posted on BizReport. Click here to view.