18 ADVERTISEMENT FEATURE Brightcove
Words by Mark Blair, SVP international, Brightcove GDPR BEGINS THE RACE FOR QUALITY With the start of the EU’s GDPR legislation last month, content providers face a number of challenges – and a few opportunities
must be able to leave a data agreement – with minimal effort – at any time. The European Commission has set stiff penalties for violation of these regulations with a fine of €10 million or 2% of a firm’s global turnover (whichever is greater) just for starters. It’s a big challenge: companies now have to be clear about how they are using people’s data and they have to be transparent with it. You have to adhere to a raft of regulations on that data; you have to manage and maintain it well, and if you make any mistakes with it, it’s going to sting. It’s early days and the jury is out on how strictly the EU will police the GDPR regulations, but there is a lot of political pressure now around privacy and the right of people to have their personal data handled appropriately. The fact that the start of GDPR coincides with the big stories about Cambridge Analytica and Facebook makes for a perfect storm for hypervigilance by authorities. Organisations that are not taking GDPR seriously and are not doing it
properly are putting themselves at risk, and there’s every chance that someone will be made an example of. Does GDPR mean that you’re starting your marketing efforts from scratch? There’s no doubt that you’re going to have to reapproach customers and projects for permission. The challenge is if you’ve been using that channel of communication for years, there’s now a real likelihood that you’re marketing database is going to shrink pretty rapidly. I personally have been inundated by emails by all sorts of services in the past few weeks, asking me to confirm my inclusion on a list or database. Many of them I can’t even recall signing up for in the first place. Some of the abilities businesses have previously enjoyed, like linking individual pieces of data to form pictures of user behaviour, may become a little less robust, and a little less granular. It may be a little more difficult to join the dots between types of user behaviour than it has been in the past.
MARK BLAIR: With the ushering in of GDPR for residents of Europe, there’s an opportunity to deliver higher quality
elcome to the Age of GDPR. From May 2018, all businesses handling the data of residents of the EU, regardless of where they are headquartered, are subject to new regulations. First, consumers must opt in to receive any type of data service, whether a simple email newsletter or a multi-year phone contract – and they must be shown to have opted in. The days of buying databases from third parties and folding them into your own are long gone. Data agreements, terms and contracts must also be easily accessible and transparent – no hidden fine print, no tricky wording and no manipulation or coercion to get someone to join a database. And you
feedzine feed.zine feedmagazine.tv
Powered by FlippingBook