Zeotap, the next-gen Customer Data Platform (CDP), has launched Consent Orchestration as part of its award winning platform, to make it easy for marketers to activate data at scale within increasingly complex data privacy constraints. It unifies, configures and automates an individual’s consent and marketing preferences across the customer journey, from data collection through to channel activation, ensuring compliance with regulations such as GDPR and CCPA.

Consent Orchestration is designed to solve a problem that plagues every marketer, particularly those in Europe. Per regulations such as GDPR and CCPA, businesses are obliged to ensure that their use of customer data is compliant. However, this is inherently difficult  - consent for an individual customer can be captured in multiple touch points, and then can differ for different activation channels and messages. The challenge for the marketer is to unify these consent choices and to act on them at speed and scale, without the need for constant vetting from a Data Protection Officer (DPO) that slows down activity.

These challenges have become an increasing concern as the number of fines for GDPR violations has surged by 113% in the last year, most notably with Amazon’s record July 2021 fine of €746m (£640.8m). As the deprecation of third-party cookies pushes marketers to rely further on first-party data, the pressure to have compliance under control is set to increase further.

“As one of the few Customer Data Platforms made in - and for - Europe, we know just how much marketers here can be paralysed by the challenges that data privacy regulations create, and that’s the problem we set out to solve,” said Projjol Banerjea, co-founder and chief product officer of Zeotap. “In doing so, we’re hoping to deliver a balance on three priorities that have previously competed with each other: scalable results for the marketer, enhanced experiences for their customer, and fewer headaches for their DPO.”

Consent Orchestration is designed to make it easy for marketers (and their DPOs) to control data privacy compliance throughout the customer journey. It does so in three key steps:

1. Unification: integrates consented data from fragmented sources into a single customer profile that delivers a single consent taxonomy
2. Configuration: maps a customer’s consent and marketing preferences to the marketers’ communication channels
3. Automation: reflects the customer’s consent and marketing preferences across marketing campaigns, ensuring GDPR and CCPA compliance on a granular level (e.g. reflection of consented purposes)

Consent Orchestration continues the consent journey that’s often begun through the use of a Consent Management Platform (CMP). Where CMPs enable the collection and mastering of customer consent and marketing preferences data, Consent Orchestration integrates with the CMP and then enables this data to be automatically reflected in all omni-channel marketing campaigns.

This end-to-end orchestration of the consent journey is governed by settings that only need to be reviewed once by a DPO in order to create a system of universal guardrails. This allows the marketer to activate at scale and speed, safe in the knowledge that consent will be reflected in all campaigns without needing constant DPO oversight.

The launch comes just two weeks after the news that Zeotap secured an USD$11m (£8.06m) extension to its Series C funding round, adding up to total funding of USD$90m (£66m). The company has also recently been named a Leader in G2’s Fall 2021 Grid Report for Customer Data Platform Software, with chief product officer and founder Projjol Banerjea recently awarded ‘Tech Pioneer of the Year’ at the Campaign Tech Awards. Earlier this year, Zeotap announced the launch of Predictive Audiences, which enables CIP users to create and activate machine-learned segments without needing data science expertise.