There’s a hypnotic drumbeat. The rhythm is constant, and the percussion becomes louder and louder. There’s a chant…”G- D- P- R, GDPR, GDPR, GDPR…” Not some long forgotten people’s republic or a 70s Olympic ski team but the General Data Protection Regulation; a set of onerous data protection requirements from the EU. Boo!
If you touch personal data from anyone in the EU you’ll have to be ready by May 2018, with the internal processes and customer facing policies all compliant with the new regulations.
But hang on! Don’t see it as a burden or a waste of investment, see it as an opportunity to transform how you use data across your business, how you store it, how you manage it, how you understand it, and most importantly… how you use it! Let’s grab the monster by the tail, and use it to your advantage.
In our research we’ve heard a lot about the challenges of making analytics successful in companies. Rather than viewing new regulations like GDPR as burdensome, they can also be seen as opportunities to take advantage of. Big, mandatory programmes can get the attention and resources that data and analytics teams require to achieve critical mass and traction.
Right to be forgotten
One of the upsides of GDPR is from an analytics perspective is with the opportunity to embed reliance on clean customer data into your value chain. What creates potential issues is what happens when the customer wants that data back. Companies are required to delete all of a user’s information if they request it, the so called ‘right to be forgotten’. While this seems simple enough, companies that have monetized their data (or where data is part of their business model) could find this ‘right to be forgotten’ to be a lot more complex. Not only would you have to delete the information you hold on the user at all levels of your value chain, but also remove that information from data you have sold on to other parties.
This is an especially large problem for ad-tech businesses, companies that very rarely create their own data but depend on buying data from other companies to support their business. Be it ad targeting, tracking, automated content creation, data consolidation, inventory management, almost all walks of ad and marketing tech are powered by data, and in most cases third party data.
This then creates a problem for the firms providing the data, as GDPR states that you must inform your users what you will do with their data and if you intend to sell it and to whom. Just ticking the T&Cs box isn’t enough, it must be clear to the user who must give their explicit consent.
With the USA being the current global powerhouse of ad-tech, and the regulations being crafted in Europe, most of these ad-tech business are not ready for GDPR. GDPR is not all bad for a lot of companies, it’s changing the way they use data, forcing them to adopt new data management processes, allowing them to understand and utilise their data in new ways. For customers it’s providing greater accountability and transparency around what data companies hold and how they use it.
There are different questions that companies will need to ask as GDPR looms – Say you’re a price comparison website:
But on the good side – a few positives might be:
Some tips to embedding real analytics capability as part of your GDPR project:
Partner
Associate Partner
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