It seems that GDPR has not only pushed data firmly onto the boardroom agenda, it has also triggered a rise in online ad impressions and cut costs, with only a minimal effect on digital marketing spend.
So says a study by social media marketing firm Socialbakers, which reveals that that since the May 25 2018 GDPR D-Day, impressions of advertisements have increased by 26%, costs have decreased by 9%, and spend overall has gone down by 7%.
The study flies in the face of predictions that the regulation would hit online ad delivery, as most campaigns depend on the availability of customer data.
Socialbakers chief executive Yuval Ben-Itzhak said: “We have marked a year since GDPR came into force across the EU. It is encouraging to learn that other regions are also looking to adopt it as well.
“GDPR brought privacy to boardrooms and front pages, and made everyone rethink about how they deal with digital data. GDPR was a paradigm shift for many businesses and marketers. Now innovation takes the lead to provide a GDPR-safe business reality, where personalised experiences and new business can still be created without compromising privacy.”
Even so, Outra chief executive Simon Hay still believes that the regulation has increased the need for comprehensive, predictive data to help connect the dots.
He added: “Every day marketing data is becoming increasingly fragmented due to the transparency and controls rightly granted to consumers, the new rules on length of data retention, the right to be forgotten and the need for explainability of models – and all this is before ePrivacy changes the data world even further.
“As a result, what is important as we move into the second year of GDPR legislation, is understanding how businesses can achieve better business outcomes within the framework of today’s GDPR realities.”
He believes the future lies in applying data science to build a market level aggregated view based on the home, built up with customer data to create layered AI-powered segmentation.
Hay concluded: “This takes advantage of complex, disparate and high volume data all of which is GDPR compliant. Not only that, but because the process of segmentation can be automated what once took months can now be achieved in weeks. This means that as GDPR legislation continues to change we are able create new segmentations cost-effectively and at speed.”
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