Waiting for the GDPR Hangover

We haven't even completed the first day of the #GDPR launch and we've just seen lawsuits totaling $8.8B filed against Facebook and Google. OK, this had to be a planned event and the group filing the lawsuit doesn't care much for the privacy policies of these companies, but the fact remains that we're just learning what this new world looks like.

The path to this exact moment in history was not a surprise. We've known about it for a few years. Only recently have we seen banter in the B2B marketing world but what we haven't seen is a truly thoughtful understanding of the underlying issues:

• How did we get here? There's been a blanket denial over the reasons government needed to step in and "solve" the issue. Somehow marketers got themselves into a place where they believe poor and declining response rates mean that they should increase the channels and cadence of their efforts. It's like the storekeeper who loses money with each sale but said he'd make it up in volume. It's a terrible idea! Did you know the AMA estimates people may receive as much as 10,000 media impressions per day? Did you know that number doubled in less than a decade? Along the same time, response metrics to the most mainstream digital channels, namely email, has declined by half. B2B marketing strategy is not keeping up with their audiences... their needs.
• What's the key challenge for marketers? Whether it has to do with hesitancy or confusion, the bulk of the challenge has to do with their own sales and marketing data. This competitive asset has all but been ignored as we've clamored to buy the latest technology. What we didn't realize is that each new platform is often used to serve more messages through a new means (see prior point), but all have served to fragment and complicate the reality of lead and target account status, needs and response. Buried in this idea, we've lost the ability to answer even the simple stuff like total volume of messages sent to an individual across all platforms... let along total messages within a platform across all campaigns. Even if we had the new requirements nailed, I'd say that GDPR compliance isn't even the hard stuff. #ABM creates an entirely new yet related challenge. Knowing who you can market to (i.e. correct approvals) is a walk in the park compared to knowing who those people are across all the sales and marketing systems and knowing account based facts like target account and buying group participation. Avoiding the data challenge is now more expensive than mere brand erosion. Just ask Google and Facebook.

Wait for the Monday morning hangover. Well, here in the US it'll be Tuesday because of our holiday weekend. None the less, on that first day back to work, marketers will realize that they've just entered a foreign land.

On that day, they'll realize those constraints of their underlying data quality and find that they are boxed into a trap... on one side they risk GDPR or CASL violations, and on the other side the inability to satiate their MQL commitment because they don't know whom they can spam that day.