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Is GDPR the Y2K for B2B marketing? And how to use it to your advantage

The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation and Y2K share some surprising similarities. Columnist Scott Vaughan breaks them down and outlines four ways to prepare your organization for GDPR.

Scott Vaughan on October 16, 2017 at 2:48 pm

Buckle in. Marketing — and your entire organization — is about to be overwhelmed with stiffer data privacy regulations around the globe. The poster child for this movement is GDPR, the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation. As a marketing leader, you’ll be spending hundreds of hours with the legal eagles and the data teams on what many analysts are calling the biggest thing to hit B2B marketing in a generation.

As we’ve been preparing for GDPR these last few months, I’m having flashbacks to my time in the IT world as we counted down to Y2K. The similarities between GDPR and Y2K are striking:

Hype, hysteria and confusion that builds during countdown to enactment while people wonder about what’s really going to happen.
Antiquated legacy tech and processes to figure out and deal with, which leads to discovering how messed up the systems and data are.
A ton of money and resources spent — some valuable, most wasted — on trying to understand its impact and what to do.

[Read the full article on MarTech Today.]

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

Scott Vaughan

Scott Vaughan is CMO of Integrate, a marketing technology software provider automating top-of-funnel marketing for B2B marketers to enable demand marketing orchestration. Scott leads the company's go-to-market and growth marketing strategy. He’s passionately focused on unlocking the potential of marketing, media, data and technology to drive business and customer value.