The Value of Being Compliant, and How to Get There

When it comes to the ePrivacy Directive, the first step towards getting compliant will be in admitting that you have a law to deal with and it's not going away.

Evidence of innovation on your part with regard to transparency - doing something meaningful to advance dialogue with your consumers, explaining how and why you are using their data - will put you in a strong, defensible position come the deadline for compliance in May 2012.

The main aim when thinking transparency is to prevent surprise. Once a consumer begins to comprehend how and why their data is collected and used in online advertising, they can better understand the exchange. Moreover, research shows that consumers respond to transparency with increased trust in brands and very low levels of rejection, arguably making compliance as much a desire as it is an obligation.

Using the services of an ePrivacy expert will not only help your company achieve compliance with the EU directive; by enabling you to empower consumers, you’ll be strengthening your brand as well, proving that you can use their data responsibly. That, in turn, helps you grow your business, as using data responsibly means that you can keep benefitting from that data. 

Compliance also helps to protect your business in another critical way. In order to disclose all of the data collection happening across your websites, you need to be able to understand it.

That investigation can reveal a lot: excessive tracker tags, many of which slow down page load time, which can impact everything from conversions to search engine optimisation. Our Evidon Encompass solution helps solve the problem, enabling the maintenance of good website ‘hygiene,’ which will improve overall online security and performance. 

What you can do:

• Formulate an internal privacy team. Ideally it should include a privacy expert, a legal expert (responsible for advertising and privacy-related matters), the leader of your brand’s website strategy, the leader of your online display media buying effort, and the lead person at your media buying advertising agency.

• Carry out an audit of the cookies being set by you and your partners on your own website. Eliminate unnecessary cookies and implement new notices to consumers explaining what these cookies are for, who is setting them, and what their options are. Deploy your advertising agency as they often manage the tracking code that enables cookies to be placed on a user’s browser from your site and from your online display ads.

• Carry out an audit of your media buying strategy and understand your partnerships, ad technology providers and sources of third party data. Be prepared to reveal these to consumers on your website.

• Join the EU self-regulatory program for behavioural advertising, operated by the IAB EU. While the scope of ePrivacy Directive goes beyond behavioural advertising, the program is rallying behind a single ‘Ad Choices’ icon (which looks like a blue arrow) that has had substantial traction in the US and is becoming the global standard for conveying the availability of information about data collection and use to the consumer.

Photo (cc) Martin Gommel