Don’t Let GDPR Concerns Stifle Innovation in Healthcare Marketing

The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation went into effect in May, and we are now seeing some real-world impacts it has had in the healthcare marketing space. One of the reasons it’s so important is that more and more companies are multinational, so even an EU-specific ruling can affect much of the world. Companies are so concerned that marketing agencies like ours are starting to see RFPs from prospective clients explicitly requiring “GDPR expertise.” While the full extent of the impact is not yet known, it is important to understand that data regulation is nothing new and that we as marketers still have a job to do — letting healthcare providers, patients, and caregivers know about new developments and potentially life-saving innovations.
This spring, as the GDPR deadline loomed, the Evoke Giant team began to ask publishers and vendors about their compliance status. While some had been making strides toward it for quite some time, it was obvious that others were scrambling to be compliant by the May deadline. Our European publishing partners were more prepared by having systems and processes in place to ensure compliance. On the other end of the spectrum, some U.S. programmatic vendors we spoke to were in very active dialogues about their data governance and even their business models during this time.

Programmatic advertising is composed of tools and processes used to find and target people online. We can use data such as browser cookies for audience targeting with a large network of publishers. Because data has to cross so many hands for this type of advertising, it is more challenging to comply with GDPR guidelines compared to a traditional digital marketing transaction that takes place directly between the publisher and the advertiser.
Arguably, programmatic advertising is a more effective and efficient method of targeting audiences and buying over traditional methods of placing ads. We increasingly utilize these technologies to precisely target healthcare professionals among the millions of anonymous online users. In fact, in the past two years leading up to the enactment of GDPR, we’ve seen more innovation in our industry vertical than ever before. Unfortunately, the requirements to collect user permission, allow users to request their data, expire it, or delete it has created a substantial hurdle for technology and data companies.
We’ve been told by several of our programmatic media partners that they intend to focus their efforts in the U.S. for the foreseeable future — meaning that the cost of advertising has just gone up and we have fewer options to reach difficult-to-find audiences in the EU. In the end, what this has meant for us and our clients is that we’ve pulled back on using programmatic vendors in the EU, replacing a lot of these startup partners with large, tried-and-true vendors that offer less innovative approaches but have the ability to maintain GDPR compliance. Sadly for our clients and countless other healthcare companies, that means taking a big step backward in marketing sophistication and effectiveness.
GDPR has also affected our traditional direct media partners, many of which cut the number of people on their for-rent email lists nearly in half. While stating that they have always been compliant with their users’ privacy and that they merely purged their list of inactive names, the result is the same. GDPR brought a heightened sense of the need to respect users’ privacy, which has led to real-world implications for the advertisers who want to reach them.
With the potential of hefty fines, we can appreciate the response by many companies to pull back on their EU efforts; it’s tempting to pull back into one’s shell and just wait to see what happens to the other players. Unfortunately, marketing budgets are not getting any bigger, and management continues to expect increasing returns on marketing investments.
While we at Evoke Giant fully support compliance with all GDPR rules, we are also concerned that an overly cautious response could set the healthcare marketing field back several years. We urge the healthcare marketing field not to give up. We can’t go backward with digital advertising or we’ll set the whole industry back years. Even as the EU demands consumer protections, consumers themselves are demanding personalization in their interactions with companies online. There’s no reason we can’t deliver a customized experience while respecting the privacy of an online audience. So let’s move ahead, together, in a responsible and careful way that still allows us to embrace innovation and more sophisticated marketing tools.
To do so, we offer three solutions to combat the potentially negative implications of GDPR:
1. Push traditional media publishers to continue to create value for advertisers such as with innovation in delivering personalized experiences.
2. Create a real value proposition for your customers. Give them a compelling reason to provide opt-in information. Show users what they will get in exchange for their information, and then follow through on delivering this value.
3. Work with your industry governing bodies such as the Internet Advertising Bureau or the Advertising Agencies of American Association so there are more dialogue and a common understanding of the valuable partnership among advertisers, information providers, and end users.
— Jason Luis is Senior Vice President of Media and Analytics Strategy at Evoke Giant. Interested in learning more? Connect with us at www.evokegiant.com.
