Data compliance and data protection are crucial elements for modern marketers to pay attention to, yet, not many marketers realize that automating end-to-end compliance is a better way to have a brand follow new regulations and data policies with ease; Jamie Barnard, co-founder CEO at Compliant shares more:

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Welcome to this MarTech Series chat, Jamie, tell us about yourself and more about your role at Compliant…

I’m the CEO and co-founder of Compliant, a leader in compliance technology for the digital ad industry and publisher of the Compliance Index. I’ve spent the last 15 years as Unilever’s General Counsel for Global Marketing and Media, was a member of Meta’s Global and EMEA Policy Councils, the co-chair of the World Federation of Advertisers Digital Governance Exchange and the chair of ISBA’s Data & Ethics Steering Committee.

As the CEO of Compliant, I stand at the frontline of digital innovation to help my team solve the many tensions between people and technology. I provide strategic guidance for both internal teams and clients to gain a deeper understanding of responsible media, spark discussions around privacy compliance, and help brands and publishers unleash the full potential of digital innovation.

We’d love to hear more about Compliant and how it is pioneering a new standard for data compliance in the digital marketing industry. 

We’re on a mission to simplify data compliance in media and advertising. As we blaze a trail to a privacy-safe future, automating compliance is the only way forward. Our technology helps advertisers measure the compliance of digital ad inventory, helps agencies curate compliant media from trusted publishers, and helps publishers demonstrate compliance to potential buyers.

It’s easy for brands to underestimate digital risk.  Mattel wouldn’t give a Barbie to a child without auditing their supply chain for harmful plastics or child labour.  CMOs must be equally serious about their supply chain.  From a privacy perspective, we live in an era of unascertained and unquantifiable risk where the cost of failure is unparallelled.

Fines are measured in the tens (if not the hundreds) of millions, with the largest single fine topping out at €1.2b. Advertisers are spending $88b a year buying media on a million websites without verifying their compliance with strict privacy regulations. Given the poor state of compliance and the enormous cost of getting it wrong, this approach is indefensible.

Recently, Compliant partnered with Peer39, the leading global provider of pre-bid contextual suitability and quality solutions for modern marketers, to introduce customers with Compliant’s data compliance metric for programmatic media campaigns. This partnership allows advertisers, agencies, and publishers for the first time to have a scalable solution for measuring data compliance in digital media campaigns while eliminating risk within marketing efforts.

The Compliant platform provides advertisers, agencies, and publishers with full transparency across the media supply chain,and visibility of privacy risks, including unlawful tracking, unauthorized data selling, data leakage, and more.

What are the key data compliance metrics that brands should be focusing on more today?

A fundamental problem with the programmatic media supply chain is the lack of access to information – meaning the first priority in the battle for transparency is to measure data compliance across owned and operated media, paid media and ad campaigns.

Over a 90-day period in Q2 2023, we measured the data compliance of 1.5b ad impressions across more than 600 media campaigns.  85% of those impressions fell below our baseline compliance benchmark. These findings are consistent with research we conducted in March 2023 when we audited 750 US publishers (accounting for 81% of North American media spend). 91% of publishers using a consent management solution are sharing data with third parties before consent has been given.  In doing so, they are breaking promises to consumers (i.e. saying one thing and doing another), which the FTC takes very seriously. The average US publisher site has 82 tags and 5 data brokers, resulting in excessive data leakage and high risk of unlawful data transfers. This is acutely problematic when the data relates to children, consumer health, and financial information.

The good news is that the tools are now available to measure data compliance across the media supply chain. This empowers companies to take pragmatic, risk-based decisions to improve compliance and protect consumer privacy without compromising performance.

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Can you talk about the challenges today’s digital-first brands face when it comes to compliance and what best practices you’d share?

In the US and in Europe, every advertiser and every publisher that integrates third party tools on their website must be able to demonstrate that any processing of personal data by those tools complies with data protection requirements. How many companies have the expertise or the resources to carry out this sort of forensic due diligence on every vendor, tag, pixel, beacon and cookie on the hundreds if not thousands of sites in their portfolio?  None. How many advertisers are measuring the data compliance of the 44,000 publishers in a typical open web programmatic media campaign? None.

Automating compliance is the only way companies can achieve the level of accountability that the law demands. If you don’t have tools to measure data compliance across your media supply chain, then you should run and get them. This should be a top priority for CMOs.

Of course, accountability requires a high level of transparency.  If you don’t have visibility of the vendors and tools transmitting data from your site, measuring and demonstrating compliance will be impossible. Thankfully, there are plenty of tools available that will provide this transparency, but not all of them will identify privacy risk or the actions you can take to improve compliance over time.

Brands need to focus on ways to improve compliance across owned and paid media to protect their business and improve consumer trust. The lack of transparency in the digital supply chain means that unintentional, unlawful, and unethical practices often go unseen. By limiting the volume and sensitivity of data collected by authorized tools, correcting technical issues with martech solutions, preventing unauthorized tools from collecting data and working with agency partners to raise standards are just a few steps brands should be taking to combat compliance challenges. Embarking on the journey to take action against these challenges reduces the chance of exposing brands to irreparable harm.

How are new compliance models changing the marketing game globally?

Data compliance is rapidly emerging as a new brand integrity metric for advertisers worldwide.  In the face of constant headwinds, marketers are adopting technology solutions to improve media quality, avoid wasted spend, mitigate risk, reduce environmental impact and limit fraud. By integrating compliance metrics into campaign planning alongside established metrics like viewability and brand safety, brands avoid wasting money on media that jeopardizes their own compliance and exposes them to unparalleled regulatory, financial, and reputational risk.

In terms of measurement, it’s a choice between investing in responsible media on the one hand, and financial, regulatory and reputational harm on the other. Without measuring the data compliance of every publisher in a marketing campaign, media dollars are literally buying risk.

Instead of funding unscrupulous publishers with a dangerous disregard for privacy, advertisers can now reward trusted publishers and improve compliance across the media supply chain.

By providing ad buyers with tools and solutions to monitor data leakage, verify consent, and identify unauthorized tags and data brokers, advertisers can improve compliance without compromising performance.

Can you comment on the growing use of AI in this area? 

Recent advancements in generative AI and the mainstream adoption of tools like ChatGPT mask the fact that AI has been part of our lives for decades. Our own Compliant Audit Technology uses AI to interrogate privacy-related data points across the open web.  There are endless ways in which AI can and will be used within the online advertising ecosystem as it makes sense of vast quantities of data; AI will be used to gather, compare, and verify information, to mimic human behavior, to automatically amend Privacy Notices in response to website changes etc. In a world where data is processed by hundreds of companies about millions of people in a thousandth of a second, compliance at scale can only be achieved through the use of AI and automation.

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Before we wrap up, take us through five must-dos you feel every B2B marketer and B2B advertiser needs to follow on a daily basis to ensure seamless journey in tune with local (evolving) compliances.

First, take a deep breath. This is not an exercise in perfection. Like sustainability, compliance is a journey that requires continuous measurement and tuning. We have to be choiceful, we have to prioritize, and we have to keep the consumer’s rights and expectations front of mind all the time. This is not a time to hold your breath and wait for the storm to pass. It’s time to weave privacy into the fabric of your business, and take accountability for your extended supply chain.

For owned and operated media, consider the following:

• Fix: Correct technical issues with CMPs, age-walls, and other martech solutions
• Block: Prevent unauthorized tools from collecting data
• Minimize: Limit the volume and sensitivity of data collected by authorized tools
• Control: Formalize terms with key vendors

For media, consider these following points:

• Exclude: Stop spending with the worst publishers
• Reward: Move spend to more compliant media
• Test: Find the sweet spot between compliance and performance
• Engage: Work with agency partners to raise publisher standards