A little over a year ago, I wrote an article about the coming together of the CIO and CMO roles. Today, technology continues to drive the evolution of digital marketing and the merging of these two worlds. Marketing and IT budgets, resources, and strategies also continue to collide.
The ongoing expansion of MarTech, however, along with the added complexities of compliance and shared data, are shifting this convergence into high gear.
Where are we now?
The General Data Privacy Regulation (GDPR), the EU data privacy law that goes into effect on May 25, 2018, has entered the fray. If you handle EU citizen data, this law applies to you — even if you’re based in the U.S. — and the penalties are severe.
Compliance regulations that in the past have impacted IT, legal, and privacy strategies are now impacting marketing as well. Things that were once foreign to marketers, such as PII (Personally Identifiable Information), SOC standards, and other privacy and security regulations, and which have primarily focused on network and SaaS types of services, have entered the marketer’s world.
I didn’t sign up for this
Chief Security Officers (CSOs) have historically given oversight of contracts, legal compliance, audits, and new security standards to IT, Network, Database, and payment system owners. Now, for the first time, they are literally cc’ing Marketing.
To makes things even more complex — many of these evolving standards are being overlaid as-is onto the marketing landscape. In many cases, the legacy standards don’t fit and create confusion, fear, and the threat of big-time penalties in a world that, until now, has never existed in Marketing.
The diligence that I experienced in years past in the SaaS and Network space is now firmly established in Marketing. As DemandGen continues to bring an Enterprise-Built strategy to the market, 80% of all new client engagements have resulted in our own increased interaction with the customer’s security team, audit process, and compliance questionnaires.
I was recently on a call with a large multinational enterprise client where Legal was reading out the status of their global GDPR compliance strategy. They asked why Marketing was on the call — and then soon realized that Marketing now owns a lot of the “new” risk. The response was, “Oh, #%@! We forgot about Marketing. Does anyone know what we have in place?” No one did.
What do we do now?
The change is in motion, and it will only further embed itself into your marketing strategies, processes, systems, and customer interaction. The best thing you can do is to get ahead of this change and educate your teams and your peers on the impacts and how to address these new standards.
So, get help early and plan ahead. You don’t want to react to this new world. Yes, it’s boring, hard, and complex, but it’s here to stay, and getting in front of it is far better than chasing after it.
The alignment of the CMO, CIO, and Legal is now table stakes
I’m seeing more and more enterprises blend their marketing databases, platforms, and processes into their overall risk profile. Use these early days of cascading standards to setup a framework of understanding and proactive mitigation to avoid a free for all.
Once these standards are simply overlaid onto Marketing, you will be spending a lot more time trying to change them, back off of items that don’t apply, educate your peers on how marketing works, and identify the risk or data that should be considered in your overall enterprise strategy.
Consider this
Just like the TSA security standards that have evolved over the past few decades, security and privacy standards for the Marketer are going to be the new normal.
If you don’t embrace this new world and take a proactive step in managing the new normal, you’re going to spend a lot of time, money, effort, and pain getting through security — and you’ll hold up your programs and revenue growth.
You don’t want to be that person holding up the line because you forgot to take your laptop out of your bag!
Consider DemandGen your own personal TSA PreCheck so you can sail through security without all the extra, unnecessary hassle. Our MarTech stack assessment and 7-point GDPR compliance check and workshop are a great place to start.
As DemandGen’s Chief Operating Officer, Greg Carver brings nearly thirty years of operations experience in the high-tech and enterprise software industry. As a strategic operator, Greg has consistently proven success as a turn-around executive, change agent and catalyst in taking technology companies to the next level. He is a hands-on customer champion with a passion for building a culture of exceptional client relationships and experiences. As an innovative mentor and determined leader, Greg’s devotion to hard work and team building translates to company success.
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