The European digital advertising industry is trying to acclimatize itself to the new advertising laws regulating third-party information. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has made it more difficult to freely use third-party information for the purposes of targeting ads.
Back To The Stone Age?
While the new GDPR rules are not the first to limit the use of third-party info for digital ads – there are a plethora of privacy options merged into online browsers these days – it does add another hurdle to digital advertising platforms, which until recently, have enjoyed a rather long reign of gathering private information at will.
The question is, will these restrictions hamper digital advertisers and advertising platforms or will new and improved methods spring up – as they always have – to create more effective marketing strategies?
The Numbers Don’t Lie
While concerns about new information restrictions loom over the heads of digital marketers in Europe and elsewhere in the world, recent statistics show that the digital advertising industry is doing better than ever.
According to PWC, a top global ad market, the kid’s digital media market has risen this year and is expected to continue its rise, shooting all the way to $1.2 billion by 2019.
While the kid’s digital media market only constitutes a portion of the entire global digital media industry, it has had privacy compliances set in place for a long time and so can be a good indicator of what is expected to come in the future for the digital advertising industry as a whole.
GDPR’s Impact To European Digital Markets
The U.S. has already experienced many compliance requirements like COPPA, and therefore the GDPR is not such a big scare for American digital marketing platforms and advertisers.
However, GDPR and its similar standards, which place much of the same restrictions on data extraction for European digital marketers, is new territory within the eastern side of the world and is one of the main reasons why the doom and gloom expectations have arisen recently among European digital ad platforms and networks.
Online Media Is King
Aside from all the restrictions being set in place within the European markets, online media still reigns supreme and has grown by 25% per annum for the past few years. The decline of TV and the advent of smartphones and tablets in Europe should continue to boost this number way into the future.
Restrictions, The Mother Of Innovation For Digital Media
In the past, when similar restrictions were placed on the U.S. digital ad market, many big brands switched to contextual advertising methods to combat the limit they had in gathering prospect information online. The result of which was new technology that incorporated zero-data info into its advertising platforms.
How does this relate to Europe’s digital advertising market in regards to its new privacy policies, though? Even with more restrictions being placed on targeting ads within European markets, the digital media advertising industry should continue to rise there as it has in the past and in other markets throughout the world through technology, innovation, and ingenuity.
Dil Bole Oberoi
