Originally published in AdExchanger.

If 2018 was the year of GDPR and 2019 was the year of CCPA-related anxiety, 2020 will be the year the digital advertising industry is forced to mature rather than just talk about it.

The threat of severe penalties for noncompliance combined with inconsistent legal guidelines (and a lack of federal privacy legislation in the United States) is causing companies to rethink their products and reckon with their business models, said Doug Knopper, co-founder and former co-CEO of FreeWheel, and now an adviser to the Tide Foundation, a nonprofit organization building an open-source framework for securing personally identifiable information.

Third-party data continues to be under pressure, and the future will favor those with direct consumer relationships. Consumers will become increasingly dubious of the supposed value exchange between themselves and businesses they engage with.

Hindsight, like the year, is 20/20.

Danny Sepulveda, SVP, policy & advocacy, MediaMath

“The majority of companies in the advertising industry want to do the right thing. Our industry is in the process of winning back trust. In the future, we’ll see more scrutiny of companies and, inevitably, more accusations of companies using backdoor workarounds in an attempt to not comply with the law.

“Consumers will tend to consent less and opt out more, particularly in the beginning, because they may believe there is no downside to doing so. If publishers wish to continue processing consumers’ personal data in order to monetize their content – and if advertisers wish to continue delivering targeted advertisements to individuals or measuring the effectiveness of contextual ads – then both parties will need to adapt their messaging to consumers to demonstrate the value consumers receive from the processing of their personal data.”

Read the rest of the article here.