“From a marketing outbound point of view, GDPR is a wakeup call,” the global head of digital marketing at Jaguar Land Rover said at the Future of Brands conference this month.
However, the business might find the changes to privacy regulation an administrative burden.
Dominic Chambers said the automotive business, with an eighty-year history, would find dealing with some aspects of the regulation difficult because of pre-digital business infrastructure, signalling problems for other older brands.
“Being a legacy business, we have many old systems across Europe that are difficult to talk to,” he said. “There’s going to be a manual process if someone asks to be forgotten. That’s not going to be easy – and it’s certainly not going to be automated.”
General Data Protection Regulation, which will come into effect in May 2018, will completely change how brands, agencies and adtech businesses are allowed to use consumers’ personal data and track online behaviour, potentially causing havoc with the data-driven marketing techniques many businesses currently employ.
Part of the regulation will give consumers the ‘right to be forgotten’, and the penalties for breaching the regulations are severe – up to 10 million Euros, or 2% of the company’s global annual turnover of the previous financial year, whichever is higher.
Despite the challenges, Chambers said he saw the regulation as a force for good.
“I think GDPR will force all marketers to up their game and be more professional. It will also ensure we’re not spamming and pissing people off,” he said.
“The most important thing to us is our customer data and ensuring it is accurate and we have the relevant permissions. It’s the number one priority.”
In a recent survey of WFA members, 94% of companies said that GDPR was important for their organisation. However, 70% said that marketers in their organisation were not fully aware of the implications of GDPR for future marketing campaigns.
