main

ARTICLE

How Retailers Can Stay Ahead of Data Privacy Regulation to Maintain and Build Client Value

May 10, 2019 — by MediaMath    

Almost a year after the GDPR came into effect, digital privacy remains a hot topic, especially as individual states pursue their own laws like the California Consumer Privacy Act. It remains to be seen if other states will follow suit or if Congress will ever pass a single federal law by which advertisers can abide. Our VP, Government Relations, Danny Sepulveda was invited back to the “Future Commerce” podcast recently to talk about data and everything that comes along with it. Danny chats with host Brian Lange about everything from the data troves governed by walled gardens to how we can ensure consumers continue to have stronger ownership over how their data is used. “Make recognition a commodity,” Danny says. “The ability to have not a known person, but a known consumer, available to the entire marketplace would de-gate the gating power that the [major platforms] have right now. Then the question becomes: What attributes and what characteristics can you use for the purposes of marketing so that you aren’t collecting more than is necessary or correct…That would create a competition above the recognition layer that would drive innovation and drive investment and do some really, really cool things…” Danny and Brian also had some specific recommendations for retailers navigating data-privacy legislation, including:

  • Retailers can get ahead of this data overload by collecting their own data for customers so that they don’t have to get it from someplace else down the road. Make it an opt-in process. Have users create accounts with you instead of relying on others to provide that information. “You’re gonna be in a much better position when laws like this come to bear,” Brian says.
  • Danny says in the short term, retailers need to be really focused on building first-party relationships and maintaining relationships with clients and continuing to provide value. “Creating them, managing them, retaining them, delivering service to people in a way that they know that you are a trusted entity and that they can continue to come back to you and trust you with the information that they give you.”
  • In the long term, Danny says, “All companies, but retailers specifically, really need to have a specific digital strategy, and they need to have specific talent in-house that is knowledgeable to the same degree as the vendors they use for digital services. They don’t have to do it all themselves…but they need to have somebody in-house who knows as much about the technology as the technology people they depend on outside of house.”

Listen to the full podcast below.