Published on June 28th, 2018 | by Saurabh Pandey
0How is GDPR Impacting Digital?
GDPR or General Data Protection Regulation comes as a sigh of relief for consumers but adds a bit of a burden on the marketers’ shoulders.
Digital marketing, especially, entails a lot of tracking and monitoring and targeting based on behavioral data, and all of these will be impacted gradually if not immediately by the advent of GDPR.
Before we proceed further, wanted to bring to your notice, that a comprehensive presentation has been created by team dotConverse on GDPR (Understand in very basic language, right from scratch). You can find this presentation just a scroll ahead.
The soul of GDPR lies in the CONSENT of users to accept cookies or to accept their data being stored and used. More importantly, consumers now have a right to know why their data is being collected and how will it be used coupled with the right to access, update and erase their data.
The above impacts the privacy policy, forms on the website and the entire website/app usage for an organization.
A lot of data collected by websites is either personal or deemed personal in nature (can be used to identify a person in conjunction with other data)
A substantial chunk of users may opt out of being tracked by Analytics (if given a choice), which implies less data for marketers. Data that will be used for re-marketing can also be opted out by users, given a choice (When I say given a choice, this is slightly ambiguous as of now in terms of whether marketers need to let users opt out of specific tracking or not.)
Another challenge for digital marketers would be to ensure that amidst so much automation and integrations the consented data from one system can very easily travel to another system- which will be anti-GDPR!
Which is why all major platforms today (Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, Quora etc.) will be impacted. However, Google’s contextual advertising system will remain a silver lining in the cloud because it allows marketers to target basis context and not behavior. Ditto for Quora, which shows ads around relevant contextual questions and answers
While some would say that GDPR pertains to EU and EU Citizens only, I think it is just a matter of time before all the major economies adopt a similar if not more stringent regulation
Marketers need to dig deeper and get educated on ‘Privacy’ and regulations like GDPR and start complying as much as possible, even if they are today not in the purview of GDPR
Do read and share your thoughts or questions, will be delighted to answer to the best of my knowledge.