INTERVIEW TAMARA DALTROFF, EACA DIRECTOR-GENERAL
MARKETING CAMPAIGNS SHOULD REFLECT
PEOPLE’S REALITY
Monitoring upcoming regulatory changes and anticipating how they will impact the industry has been one of the main challenges of 2021, and will continue to be a challenge in 2022. The EACA stands ready to provide the industry with valuable input at any given moment
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ACA – the European Association of Communications Agencies – has been the voice of Europe’s communications agencies and associations for years. Here we speak with EACA Director-General Tamara Daltroff about the major issues confronting the industry today, as well as commercial communications’ economic and social contribution to society. Looking back at 2021, what have been the major legislative challenges faced by the industry and what are you expecting for 2022? Innovation in the sector has been fast-paced over the last decade, not to say the last decades. However, what’s new is the desire of legislators to increasingly regulate innovation in response to the rising economic and social impact of media and communication actors. In this context, monitoring upcoming regulatory changes and anticipating how they will impact the industry has been one of the main challenges in 2021, and will continue to be in 2022. Various legislative initiatives are emerging to enhance the transparency of the Digital Single Market. These include, of course, the Digital Services Act (DSA), which sets rules for media platforms, hosting and service providers and for very large online platforms (VLOPs) to combat illegal content and improve the transparency and accountability of platforms. Similarly, the
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Communications 2022
Digital Markets Act (DMA) sets out criteria for identifying market “gatekeepers” and specifies what they should and shouldn’t do online. These two pieces of legislation alone have important implications for the advertising industry. Targeted advertising is likely to be prohibited for minors, but also for categories of personal data considered sensitive, i.e., data revealing racial or ethnic origin, political opinion or religious or philosophical beliefs.
There are still important questions about the implementation of these provisions. How can we ensure that minors are protected against targeted advertising? Likewise, a ban on targeted advertising for minors means, in return, that non-targeted ads to minors are still possible. To what extent is this a major achievement? If the legislator wants to prohibit targeted advertising based on the profiling of minors, it should be explicitly mentioned in the text of the
