Once upon a time, there was a talented little SAAS company who was making a lot of money thanks to a mix of state of the art engineering, Marketing agility, and Sales Ninjas. They all lived happy in this company and were successful in a place called “The Valley of Peaches”.
But one day, they felt the wind blowing louder than usual, and clouds were getting together to form a strange word in the sky that said GDPR.
Whatever that was, it seemed cold and far far away. The talented little SAAS company had nice and comfortable buildings that kept them safe from the colder weather, and this cloud didn’t seem very different from other scary clouds that turned out to be irrelevant.
They got used to this GDPR cloud above their heads and to the temperature dropping. They might have thought that this cloud that says GDPR might also say GOLD or another unclear acronym that people see in the sky when they don’t have anything else to do in front of their computers.
The little company got colder and colder, to the point where they could not hide the GDPR letters in the clouds anymore, it was definitely what it seemed to be.
Later, the talented little SAAS company did some research and realized that this heavy cloud came from Europe and was getting ready to hurt the valley of peaches, the valley of silicon and the valley of apples. The cloud would change into a thunder, then floods and wipe all little talented SAAS companies who collect information about their customers. It could drop 20 million gallons of water or more in some locations.
All little SAAS companies in the different valleys were scared and started to buy a lot of umbrellas. The umbrella businesses were booming.
Then, the floods came from this GDPR cloud and changed everything the little talented SAAS company and its friends knew and cherished.
THE END
I feel like I am turning into this old millennial telling horror stories when I tell my friends and other marketers that they need to get their s!#@ [processes] in order. Keep in mind that GDPR is a huge opportunity to improve the way we do marketing around the world and manage customer data.
For Marketers who don’t believe GDPR is coming, or it’s just another international hoax: WAKE UP!
If you count on EU’s generosity and pity to get you off the hook when your EU recipients complain about your marketing outreach: WAKE UP!
I‘ll probably have more scary stories between now and May 28th when GDPR becomes the law…
More info about GDPR:
The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is the most important change in data privacy regulation in 20 years.
The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) replaces the Data Protection Directive 95/46/EC and was designed to harmonize data privacy laws across Europe, to protect and empower all EU citizens data privacy and to reshape the way organizations across the region approach data privacy.