GDPR One Year Later: What’s a Marketer to Do?

Just in time to celebrate the one-year anniversary of GDPR, we’ve put out an infographic with some of the interesting effects we’ve seen.

If you’re one of the prepared ones, you and your team were ready for GDPR to come in and require all sorts of changes to your marketing efforts. And if you were able to audit your data, fix your processes to align to the GDPR’s various personal data rights, and ensure clear consents from your users, you haven’t been fined. Lucky you!

But in the past year, some haven’t been so lucky.

In perhaps the most public scolding by GDPR rules, France’s privacy regulator fined Google a massive €50 million fine for their lack of consent regarding ad personalization. Information was neither comprehensive nor transparent, and it was found that users wouldn’t be able to reasonably understand the processing operations for the ads personalization.

While that fine may seem staggering, you might want to consider that, were they to be fined the maximum GDPR limit of 4% of annual global turnover, Google would be hurting in the billions.

So let’s celebrate a year of being more responsible with our users’ personal data. While these regulations may have put a dent in our email lists, remember that contact information given with full consent and with full information can only serve to populate our lists with more willing leads.

Check out the full infographic here for more stats, plus four steps to ensure your emails are not GDPR-friendly but also get read.

And Happy One-year Anniversary to GDPR!