Three lessons marketers have learned about the GDPR
Originally published as “One Year In: Three Lessons Marketers Have Learned About the GDPR” on Advomatic’s website on June 6, 2019, Ochen Kaylan discusses the impact of GDPR, and other data privacy initiatives and regulations on digital marketing. He notes three ideas at the core of the most successful marketing teams post-GPDR: embrace privacy rights; build strong relationships with your privacy officers; and take the long view by focusing on good privacy experience (PX).
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) went into effect one year ago on May 25, 2018, much to the distress of marketers everywhere. For so long, a core business activity of digital marketing was to collect information about users, their interests, and their habits, to extract insight from that data, and then to use that insight to craft messaging back to current and potential customers. But then the GDPR arrived on the scene and seemingly obstructed our most basic work of collecting useful data about our customers. To address the most pressing regulatory obligations, lawyers and IT managers and privacy officers snapped into action to lock everything down. No more customer data harvesting. No more opt-outs or soft-ops. No more historic customer data warehousing. No more shareable user data. Restricted access to customer data. Restricted access to analytics data. Restricted user tracking. And the marketing teams just had to deal with the fallout of this lockdown.
Now, one year later, some marketing teams have started to figure out what digital marketing looks like in this new post-GDPR world. Some marketers have even figured out how to flourish in this new environment. In my work with dozens of legal, technology, and marketing departments before and after GDPR enforcement, I’ve started to see patterns in how the most effective marketing teams are not only surviving the GDPR, but are actually using it to market even more effectively and successfully than they ever had before.
