The EU Data Protection Regulation will affect all direct marketing, but will affect different sectors in different ways.

So what will the impact be for you?

Whatever the form of the final regulations, the way you do business will change. Here are the key ways in which your organisation might feel the impact of the proposals as they currently stand:

• Analytics become impossible as tracking of IP addresses is banned
• Profiling is practically prohibited without the explicit consent of the consumer
• Tailored online experiences will require explicit consent
• Ads can no longer be targeted to individuals
• Data can no longer be used to target future marketing activity
• Debate over whether legacy data will be exempt from the new rules, or whether it will be rendered unusable

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Email marketing

• No tracking data allowed without explicit consent, making effectiveness extremely difficult and unreliable to measure
• Profiling and segmentation will become difficult and patchy
• Tailored content will be hard to target and harder still to measure

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Social media

• Marketing can no longer be targeted based on profiling
• Campaigns can only be analysed by the most basic measures; demographic analysis won't be possible

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Mobile marketing

• Profiling information can't be used to target messaging
• No tracking data allowed without explicit consent, making effectiveness extremely difficult and unreliable to measure

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Data industry

• Hardest hit of all: most current activities will become heavily restricted or unviable
• Data will become impractical and expensive both to source and keep up-to-date; making it extremely difficult to form an accurate picture of your marketplace
• Legacy data might be required to comply with new regulation, raising the spectre that prospect lists could be decimated
• List broking severely restricted

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Direct mail

• Move from opt-out to opt-in: explicit consent needed to send any message to any recipient, with the exception of existing customers
• Existing databases may not be usable under regulation: could decimate prospect lists
• Demographic information will have to be wiped

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Charity

• Possibility of exemption for fundraising activities only
• Marketing of commercial products, such as charity Christmas cards, to be restricted

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Telemarketing

• Move from opt-out to opt-in
• No cold calling to prospective customers
• No profiling or segmentation without individual consumer's consent

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