GDPR: Wake up and smell the consent!

Imagine your most financially-important marketing campaign of the year, the success of which affects every other campaign your brand undertakes.

Then try and picture the passion your creative team, marketing director, analysts and CEO would direct to every part of that project. No lack of energy, agency expertise, analytical process, consumer testing or insight would be spared to guarantee success, because a low response resulting in failure is not an option.

Now contrast this with the way brands develop consent statements. Consider the lack of creativity, analysis and testing this ‘legal chore’ is given.

Tick, tick, tick, goes the GDPR clock as the 25^th May 2018 deadline gets ever closer.

According to our research 69% of senior marketers (source: fast.MAP post-event surveys) do not know the level of consent achieved by their current consent statement.

It’s possible the statement has remained the same for years. Often it will be a paragraph or two created to cover every customer and normally the creative team or agency were never involved and were bypassed by company lawyers.

The CEO’s overriding interest can be that the statement is legally compliant. Back in the day for many it was a game of hide the opt-out box, but GDPR changes the rules. It’s now a marketing challenge.

How times have changed! The insight, creativity and communication that surround consent statements are the fulcrum through which brands gain marketing consent.

Every hour of every day, brands are losing money because the considerable talent of their marketing teams are not deployed with the year’s most crucial project.

fast.MAP has collaborated with many brands to test thousands of consent statements and have proven that small differences in wording, structure, creative execution matter greatly to consent rate.

Consumers are now super-sceptical. In the hide-and-seek era, small font-sizes were good. Now it has the reverse effect, because carefully investigate the statement to discover what they are committing to. Small type makes it appear the organisation has something to hide.

The game of hide and seek is over. Get set for GDPR: Wake up and smell the consent.

Read about the three key pillars that influence consent – www.fastmap.com/pillars

What makes consent an ‘elevator pitch’ – www.fastmap.com/elevator

How consent can be about quality, not quantity – www.fastmap.com/types

Download the 11 Steps to Your Consent and Permissions whitepaper – normally £50, free for DMA members with download code 11STEPS102 – www.fastmap.com/11steps