The European Commission has given the green light to the creation of an ad tech joint venture. This will take the form of a digital marketing technology platform that will need to collect user consent to facilitate brand communication.
The news fell on Friday, February 10. The operators Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefónica and Vodafone, on the latter’s initiative, have announced the forthcoming creation of a joint venture. This project aims to support the digital advertising and marketing activities of brands and publishers in France, Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom and Italy. Brussels, whose opinion was eagerly awaited, indicated that the operation would not pose any problem of competition within the European Economic Area.
A joint venture to develop a technological solution for digital advertising in Europe
Each company will have 25% of the shares of the future entity. The latter will be established in Belgium and managed by an independent management, all under the control of a supervisory board whose members will be appointed by the shareholders. The company, whose name is still unknown, will offer a platform designed to comply with standards such as the GDPR and the ePrivacy directive. Germany has already been the scene of such experiments. Tests will soon be carried out in France and Spain to refine the platform.
Concretely, the tool will have to be based on the user’s “opt-in” agreement (which means that if he does not expressly say “Yes” in one click, it must be considered as “No” ) to generate a unique numeric code. The digital token will be pseudo-anonymized and non-reversible. This will be the only shared data.
The consent will allow brands to carry out their various communications by publishers. They will be able to recognize users on their website or application on this pseudonymous basis, then group them under different categories, and thus adapt their content to specific user groups. A FLoC with GDPR sauce, in short. Consumers can freely revoke their consent. They can manage it directly from the brand or publisher’s website, or from an easily accessible privacy portal.
Give consumers control over their data
The idea of this platform set up by the four European operators is to provide a major improvement in the control, transparency and protection of consumer data, currently collected, stored and distributed by digital giants located outside of Europe.
The European Commission wanted to ensure that the structure of the operation would not significantly restrict competition in the target markets. For Brussels, once the company is created, there will be enough other suppliers pursuing the same goal. The authority also ensured the proper compliance of the firm’s activities, in particular through contact with entities responsible for data protection.
The joint venture is expected to unveil its vision, strategy and marketing intentions, in addition to its name, in the coming weeks.
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