Commentary

Thank You GDPR, My In Box Is Getting Less Cluttered By The Day

I don’t know about you, but in the past week or 10 days I’ve been getting a lot of emails that begin something like this: “An Important Notice About Privacy.” 

I’m pretty sure it’s all about GDPR, even though you wouldn’t know it from the missives, which don’t specifically mention the new European regulation. 

Which is probably the way to go for marketers, given that most consumers don’t know squat about GDPR and mentioning the new privacy regulation by its acronym would probably just confuse readers more than anything else. 

Companies I’ve never heard of (or haven’t paid attention to) are sending me notes saying that if don’t respond soon, they’ll take me off their email lists. 

Oh, what a shame! 

Some of them even make a point of saying they’ll miss me if I don’t opt in. Well, that makes one of us. 

But seriously, this is good, as it provides a great opportunity to clean out my mail box, which has 100,000 plus emails in it. I’m pretty good at ignoring stuff I’m sure has nothing to do with the business at hand that I have to conduct in any given day. Hence, the clutter. 

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So far, I’d say about 75% of the “important privacy” notices received, I’ve essentially opted out of hearing from the senders in the future. By doing nothing. 

It’s truly a win-win. Because marketers I have no interest in and never will can now focus their attention better on potential customers that care about what they have to say and offer. 

And I’ll pay more attention to the 25% of those marketers I’ve elected to continue to receive messages from. 

This GDPR thing was a smart play on the part of European regulators. It should be a global thing, right? I mean if audience targeting is the future of advertising, and I don’t think there’s much disagreement on that point, then there’s no more engaged audience than one that has opted in.

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