Week in Media: Your country needs you
Don’t leave it to a Brexit-obsessed government to make the online ads system better. Our media industry should have the talent and ambition to lead, writes the editor
The lack of seriousness with which Oliver Dowden seems to take his role as Digital, Culture Media & Sport secretary is pretty much the only memorable thing about him.
This is someone who took time out of his Sunday to “speak to Google” and ask why an image of Winston Churchill had temporarily disappeared from a particular page on Google Images.
This is a politician who spends a significant amount of time writing about how statues are so very important in ensuring Britain (always Britain, never the UK, for some reason) preserves its history. What little time I did spend in the university library would apparently have been better spent gazing at bronze monuments.
He’s the minister in charge during yet another Conservative government attempt to privatise Channel 4. as Raymond Snoddy has warned about this week.
And this week, he has seen fit to debase himself and our government further by setting out the UK’s departure from GDPR, a world-leading set of legal standards designed to protect Europeans from online privacy abuses.
Cookie argument crumbles
Despite its sexy name, the General Data Protection Regulation, is admittedly not perfect.
It comes with heavy compliance costs – you have to have either a data privacy officer or lumber someone with thankless responsibilities.
The authors of a recent academic report have suggested that venture-capital investment in Europe is down by a third relative to the US because of increased privacy costs and a higher risk of substantial fines.
Perhaps there is a case for creating a more sophisticated and less costly UK version of GDPR. But Dowden doesn’t seem interested in complexity or nuance. Instead, he would rather tell us that he wants to put an end to “irritating” cookie requests that pop up on websites.
Such lofty ambitions! Perhaps if he were minister for restaurants, he could order waiting staff to stop hectoring customers about whether we have any food allergies with every single order.
Then, as if proud of demonstrating how little he understands about this whole thing, Dowden briefed The Telegraph that cookies which pose a “high risk” will still require consent notices.
If you’ve been the victim of a high-risk cookie, please contact me immediately – this would be quite a revelation.
As Jack Shearring points out today, the wider argument about cutting “red tape” is a canard.
Our media industry has spent the last few years investing considerable resources into privacy compliance and, even if a UK GDPR is less restrictive, many businesses with links to EU countries will still need to be compliant in those markets anyway.
Plus, many US states and major countries around the world are looking at strengthening their own online privacy laws protecting consumers, so weakening our own could become even more counter-productive.
Don’t settle for less
As usual with this government, it comes down to Brexit.
As it was with creating a trade border in Northern Ireland or failing to stop a killer virus from killing 130,000 of us, the singular motivation is always to make Brexit look like a success at the expense of literally everything.
Watering down our privacy standards is not going to create a Brexit “dividend”, as Dowden or his master hopes. Nor will forcing a sell-off of Channel 4.
Publishers should be open and transparent with readers about how they collect and use data about them to serve ads. Yes, cookie requests are a pretty poor way of trying to get user consent, but it’s up to the industry to innovate and find a better way.
Despite constant political meddling, the UK boasts some of best marketing and media talent in the world that solves problems every day for advertisers, whether that is coming up with a novel brand-building strategy or innovative uses of media strategy and execution.
This week I wrote about Dentsu X’s two-track media plan for sport streaming service DAZN’s first major UK campaign. These are the kinds of stories Mediatel News will tell more often as per our mission to champion excellence in media.
We also have a thriving digital sector, with globally renowned agencies and ad tech specialists creating enormous value for both businesses and consumers.
Programmatic buying is well known to have its structural challenges, but this week’s insight into “curated marketplaces” by The Programmatic Advisory’s Joel Franklin should give grounds for future optimism.
It shouldn’t be beyond the capabilities of this industry to make the online ads ecosystem work better for consumers and for advertisers. Where government is lacking, media companies can lead the way.
Omar.oakes@mediatel.co.uk