So, despite all the furor surrounding GDPR and the impact on programmatic, we have yet to see any lasting impacts. However, ad tech shouldn’t get too comfortable. In June this year, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), which is responsible in the UK for implementing GDPR, published its “Update report into adtech and real time bidding.”
The report outlines the concerns the ICO has with the creation and sharing of personal data profiles brought about specifically by real-time bidding practices. It was passed to players in the ad tech sector for response and will be further reviewed by the end of 2019.
“They have fired warning shots across the bows of ad tech,” said Andrew Buckman, CEO at digital ad marketplace Sublime. “They're not happy with the way that ad tech is managing GDPR and are essentially asking them to be stricter in the near future. Over the next 12 to 24 months, consumers who have consented to be targeted based on data are going to become rarer and rarer, which means that they will become more expensive.”