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What to Look For in a Preference and Consent Management Platform

  • - Geri Kirovska
  • 3 min read

As data privacy regulation becomes the new normal, compliance becomes the baseline of expectations. As such, when it comes to consumer-facing compliance technologies, such as a preference and consent management platform (CMP), it’s imperative to work with a partner that not only enables compliance, but furthers your monetization strategies while providing a seamless consumer experience.

With a properly implemented consent management platform, you’ll be able to easily manage all Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) registered vendors, as well as any other vendor collecting personal data on your digital properties. However, since some vendors have different use cases spanning multiple products that all need to be organized differently, choosing the right partner can be tricky. Further beyond just vendor management, the best CMPs also need to satisfy the requirements of diverse groups of stakeholders across marketing and monetization/yield management, legal, and tech leads (e.g. webmasters and app developers). To get you on the right track, we’ve compiled a list of key characteristics on what to look for in a CMP below.

Marketing

Once a CMP is implemented, it is effectively the gateway to your site or app. A CMP becomes a brand touch point, and marketing and monetization managers should take ownership of it alongside the legal team. To do so, they need to be equipped with the right tools and guidance. For marketing and monetization managers, what makes an effective CMP is:

  1. A clean, well-organized UI that facilitates effective communication with site visitors and/or app users that seamlessly adds to the user experience.
  2. A high degree of customizability with regard to look and feel as well as content.
  3. Expertise not only in compliance, but also in ad tech monetization. The ideal partner should be equally adept at keeping you apprised of decisions from EU data protection authorities (DPAs) and navigating the IAB’s Transparency & Consent Framework to enhance your monetization strategy.

Legal

A legal stakeholder is less likely to be concerned about the user experience but, among other criteria, still requires a solution that clearly communicates to consumers why and how data is being used. The primary needs of legal and compliance stakeholders include:

  1. A solution that provides flexibility around what GDPR compliance means for their company and how to implement it, e.g., whether an opt-out button should be on the first CMP screen or not.
  2. Knowledge on topics like GDPR compliance, IAB TCF policies, best practices, and Data Protection Agency (DPA) decisions per EU country to help enable ongoing compliance beyond initial setup.
  3. An audit log to provide proof of consent by maintaining a record of time stamps, version control, privacy policy control, origin, and user IDs.

Tech Leads

Finally, an organization’s webmasters and app developers also need to have confidence in the solution. The most frequent concerns we typically hear about are:

  1. Speed. Every millisecond counts when it comes to page load time–especially if your digital properties leverage header bidding. Any new solution added to a page should add minimal latency.
  2. Security. Security is always important and worth evaluating whenever adopting any new solution. A good CMP partner will be open and transparent about their security practices and how they protect consent data collected from consumers.
  3. Ease of implementation. Placing a CMP on your website or app is easy enough, but ensuring all vendors—both TCF and non-TCF—are respecting the signals from the CMP is not always an easy task. Compliance technology should make that process as simple as possible. 

It’s worth noting that the value of experience should not be underestimated. While we’ve listed many features that comprise a strong solution, experience makes a huge difference in creating a stable technology with high up-time and minimal latency while enabling your compliance without negatively impacting monetization efforts. Consent management solutions that are able to satisfy all the above criteria are the partners that can make a difference, and not only help you enable compliance, but maintain compliance. To learn about how LiveRamp Privacy Manager can help your business, contact us at [email protected].