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This week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks is all about – what else? – GDPR.
On the eve of the May 25 compliance deadline, we invite guest Patrick Salyer, CEO of SAP-owned identity management platform Gigya, to talk about the enforcement and long-term impact of the regulation.
Salyer says GDPR is much more akin to Sarbanes-Oxley than it is to past digital privacy efforts, such as Do Not Track in the US. In other words, we’ll still be talking about GDPR in five years.
“It’s not a topic that goes away,” he says.
Among the probable outcomes of GDPR, and pending regulations like it, is the slow fade of third-party data in the marketing ecosystem. The most obvious early indicator of this is Facebook’s termination of data integrations with Acxiom and other data platforms.
“As an industry, we’ve done everything technologically possible to drive a better experience. We ended up tracking consumers without their permission [and] buying data on consumers from third-party data brokers,” says Salyer. “That’s going away.”
And marketers will be forced to work more closely with their IT counterparts. Better ties between the two departments has been a talking point for years, but in reality, “[m]arketers and the IT folks have largely been two separate organizations,” he says.
“What’s happened is that marketers have tried to act almost independently of their IT counterparts and they’ve actually tried to get cloud-based technologies to go do it on their own,” he says. “You can’t really do that in this world of consent-driven, first-party data.”
For example, GDPR requires a company to know where its first-party data is being stored. But many organizations, especially complex ones with call centers, shipping fulfillment and other logistical functions, house tens if not hundreds of data silos.
Most importantly, there’s an opportunity for companies to be more values-led.
“The marketer needs to think philosophically, what kind of company are we? That’s a new conversation,” Salyer says. “I firmly believe we have a sea change happening where the real driver is what consumers want. The fine is the least of a company’s worries. It’s actually the consumer that feels like their privacy and security is not being met.”
