The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) comes into force this month and is expected to prompt a ripple effect across the US, leading most marketers to identify data privacy as one of their most important issues for 2020.

Like the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the CCPA limits how companies can collect, store, use and share customer data and gives consumers more control over their personal information.

Yet more than half of respondents (52%) to a survey for WARC’s Marketer’s Toolkit 2020 believe they need to strengthen their data policies, 45% expect advertising and marketing regulation to become “more strict”, while 88% agree, or strongly agree, that digital privacy will become increasingly important this year.

“The misuse of consumer data under this new CCPA regime could be the death knell for a company. We hope it won’t be, but this is why marketers must act now,” said Dave Grimaldi, EVP of Public Policy at the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

Marc Pritchard, Chief Brand Officer at Procter & Gamble, added: “We’re doing [with CCPA] just as we did on GDPR. We really take a very high standard when it comes to data. What we would prefer is a common privacy approach [in the US], because it’d be ideal to have one privacy approach and not 27, or, worse, 50.”

In China, meanwhile, the Personal Information Security Specification proposes an “unbundling” of data protection consents, which will affect the ability to use consumers’ personal data for marketing purposes.

Marketers can expect greater scrutiny, particularly on data that are deployed for personalised marketing, such as transaction data, location and device data, and behavioural data.

These are some of the key findings in The Data Report, the Policy chapter of WARC’s Marketer’s Toolkit 2020; the report also noted:

Consent management and ‘small data’ are top priorities for 2020

Consent, permissions and transparency will be the new normal for marketers in 2020 and the WARC survey reveals that 57% of respondents agree or strongly agree that they are “readdressing consent management practices in light of privacy regulation”.

Some are investing in consent management platforms (CMPs), which collect and store customers’ consent data, enabling marketers to keep track of peoples’ privacy preferences and permissions.

And marketers are also prioritising first-party data, with 58% of respondents agreeing or strongly agreeing that they have a strategy for actively collecting first-party data from customers.

“For us, a big part of it is whether we agree with how our partners are using data,” said Jill Baskin, CMP at The Hershey Company. “We just want to get a lot more transparency from our partners... How are they keeping [data]? We want to have not just what’s the legal thing, but what we ethically think is right.”

Regulation of big tech is welcomed by marketers as well as consumers

A study by YouGov found that just over half of global consumers want to see more regulation of tech and social media companies. This attitude is shared by marketers: 86% of WARC’s survey respondents think big tech companies should be subject to greater regulation.

GroupM’s Rob Norman, Senior Advisor and Brian Wieser, Global President, Business Intelligence, note: “The issue of privacy and exploitation of data is among the most complex of our time. Even if consumer privacy is not being unjustifiably violated, the monetisation of data by major platforms has become a social, political and regulatory lightning rod.”

Consumers will take more control over their data and their digital identities

Several surveys have found that consumers are being much choosier about where and how they share information. For example, research by Dentsu Aegis has revealed that 44% of global consumers have taken steps to reduce the amount of data they share online.

Brands recognise this shift and 66% of respondents to the WARC Marketer’s Toolkit survey agree or strongly agree that consumers will take greater control of their data in 2020.

Read more on privacy-first marketing in The Data Report, the Policy chapter of WARC’s Marketer’s Toolkit 2020. The Marketer’s Toolkit covers five key drivers of change: society, tech, economy, industry and policy. A deep-dive into each – for which WARC has collaborated with sister Ascential brand WGSN – is available to WARC subscribers. 
 is available to WARC subscribers.

Sourced from WARC