Why media agencies are prioritizing building privacy expertise this year as a host of new laws roll out

With privacy restrictions tightening, agencies will have to step up their privacy practices this year.

Whether it is clean room technology or installing a privacy team, media agencies are faced with having to juggle emerging state regulations and expand their consumer protection efforts globally. While the U.S. has lagged behind regulating consumer privacy compared to the European Union, this year a handful of states will implement their own laws — from California to Connecticut.

“Privacy is a pretty common word that means so many different things, depending on what your businesses are, what you do and how you want to apply it,” said Ashwini Karandikar, evp of media, tech and data at 4A’s. “Globally, the application of policy [varies] by country, by continent, by region, by marketer.”

Meanwhile, Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) continues to crack down on privacy violations. The European Commission will soon require EU nations to share GDPR investigations and actions taken on them every two months to step up enforcement. For example, the board in January pushed Ireland to raise a data processing fine on Meta from $30.4 million to more than $420 million.

Building privacy expertise

For some agencies, it has become necessary to bring on legal and privacy support. At some of the larger holding companies, it might mean additional hiring on the data and privacy teams and dedicating more resources to this area, Karandikar explained.

“There’s also a lot of work being done with external experts seeking external counsel on these topics,” Karandikar said. “Agencies of all sizes now, not just holding companies anymore, are starting to dedicate resources towards this topic, because it is now material [in order to] do business across the board.”

As Stacey Stewart, U.S. chief marketplace officer at UM, previously mentioned to Digiday, consumers are also getting savvier in understanding how they are tracked online with cookies. And with the increase of privacy laws, she said it made sense for UM to add a chief privacy officer in 2020 and a privacy lead member on each of its accounts. Stewart believes more agencies will have to spend more time working closely with legal as the laws evolve.

Arielle Garcia, chief privacy officer at IPG’s UM Worldwide, sits on the business side and said her role is a unique marriage of two fields within privacy and media agencies. She oversees compliance and client support, and increasingly agencies have developed or embedded privacy roles in their product or account teams.

“This has different flavors at different agencies,” Garcia said. “Either way, it takes someone that has both a strong understanding of regulations and is tracking those developments, but also understands adtech and the data flows … so you kind of need a marriage of both skill sets.”

UM has also recently expanded its efforts to create client privacy champions to focus client needs. Eventually, Garcia said the goal is to both have a central team that is tracking privacy, but also build a “foundational competency” across disciplines to support clients.