It's been a month since the European switch-over to GDPR, an effort to protect consumers' identities and data and to allow consumers more say into the type of advertising they see. In the US, many forward-thinking brands also made changes to comply for their European customers. How is the big change impacting them?
Kristina: One month in, has anything changed for you since gdpr went live?
Mike Tarpey, COO, Underdog Media: No, not really. It was a race to the finish line and it did have a Y2K feel to it at times (for those that remember the early 2000s), but we listened to the market and did the correct work. We did expect to see some attrition from EU partners due to GDPR but that hasn't happened. Honestly, we're happy to have May 25th in the rearview but it never changed our focus to drive value for publishers and DSPs.
Kristina: Are you surprised by anything that has happened in the last month regarding GDPR?
Mike: In the end, the amount of work that went into this compliance was surprising. There were some bumps along the way and a few last-minute prebid updates but nothing that caught us off guard. As we got closer to the deadline, it was more of an eye opener than we initially anticipated but we rolled up our sleeves, talked to our partners and did what we needed to do to get it done.
Kristina: Do you expect more changes to come to the industry once regulators sift through complaints and start making enforcements?
Mike: We shall see, our crystal ball is not giving that up yet. Perhaps for those businesses that deal with consumers' very sensitive personal information, however, for a business such as ours that only stores IP addresses for a limited time period it's hard to imagine what else we could change.
Kristina: What do you think of the GDPR?
Mike: In principal and concept, I think it's a great thing for the consumer, as it applies to users truly personal data, data breaches and protecting users from the bad actors.
Originally published in BizReport by Kristina Knight
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