Marketing

Privacy, data and the rising bar for marketers

16 March 2026 · 5 min read

The direction of travel on personal data is clear and consistent: more consent, more transparency, and more accountability for how businesses collect and use it. Reforms to privacy law, tighter platform rules, the decline of third-party tracking cookies, and a public that is simply more wary all point the same way.

What this means in practice

Marketing that depends on quietly harvesting data and following people around the internet is becoming both harder and riskier. Marketing built on permission, where people choose to hear from you because the value is clear, is becoming the durable option. That is a good change for businesses with something genuine to say, and an awkward one for those relying on borrowed attention.

Own your audience

The practical response is to invest in relationships you actually control: an email list people opted into, a genuinely useful newsletter, content that earns a return visit. First-party data, given willingly, is more accurate, more durable and less exposed to the next platform policy change than anything rented from an ad network. It compounds while rented audiences reset.

Regulated sectors carry an extra layer

For financial services and other regulated industries, advertising rules sit on top of privacy law. Claims must be accurate and not misleading, records may need to be kept, and the line between general information and regulated advice must be respected. The safe path is to design campaigns with those obligations in mind from the start, rather than checking them at the end when the creative is already made.

None of this is a reason to retreat from marketing. It is a reason to build on first-party relationships, clear consent and honest claims, which is where trust was always going to be won.