Six “gatekeepers” are at the heart of this legislation: Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, ByteDance (TikTok), Meta, and Microsoft. They all match three specific, cumulative conditions defined by the EU – economic, geographical, and temporal.
More precisely, gatekeeper services considered “Core Platform Services” will be affected by DMA requirements.
Powerful online platforms currently behave as “gatekeepers” in the digital world. The DMA aims to guarantee equitable behavior from these platforms. By implementing this legislation, the EU means to reframe gatekeeper responsibilities; the DMA fits within a context where the Union attempts to establish its digital sovereignty and create healthier competition by unlocking innovative potential.
Gatekeepers were officially named in September 2023 and must comply with the DMA by March 6, 2023.
The Digital Market Act will be applied within the European Economic Area (EEA), which includes all 27 EU countries as well as three additional nations: Norway, Iceland, and Lichtenstein.
To encourage the development of a competitive, innovative digital ecosystem, strong regulations are imposed upon gatekeepers relating to:
Regulating user-related data-sharing practices between services within an ecosystem will predominantly impact gatekeepers’ advertising departments and, consequently, advertisers’ marketing teams. In effect, these sharing practices allow for media activation (targeting or excluding audiences, targeting lookalike audiences) and measurement (media attribution).
From March 6, 2024, gatekeepers must ensure that auditable, traceable consent signals are collected from users to allow data sharing between services within an ecosystem.
As several of its services were classified as “Core Platform Services” (CPS), Google has officially been identified as a gatekeeper. As such, the company must comply with the Digital Market Act. Notably, Google was the first gatekeeper to announce compliance measures related to this regulation.
As a gatekeeper, Google must collect explicit consent from its users before sharing and cross-referring their data between its platforms for targeting purposes. This DMA regulation will have the strongest impact on advertisers, directly affecting audience sharing from Google Analytics 4 to Google’s media activation platforms (Google Ads and GMP suite), and the creation of audiences derived directly from these platforms’ tracking data, which represent widely deployed use cases.
As Google now needs to collect auditable and traceable consent signals to activate cross-platform audiences, advertisers must undertake several actions:
Choosing a Google-certified Consent Management Platform is recommended for implementing Consent Mode v2
The DMA will primarily impact media targeting. Measurement (leveraging GA4 events for measuring purposes within media tools) could be impacted later in 2024.
Google will share more information on the matter by the end of 2023 – we will relay relevant news on fifty-five’s website, the Tea House blog, and on social media.
The sharing of consent signals depends on user location, which will be determined and measured through IP addresses. For instance, a Swiss brand must collect consent signals from French, Italian, or German visitors browsing from their respective countries and share them with Google through Consent Mode v2.
As of the publication of this article, the other gatekeepers have yet to announce compliance measures.
In a digital environment in constant flux, fifty-five helps brands define their data strategy and deploy collecting and activation technologies in a safe and compliant manner. If you’d like to know more about our offers or have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact us!
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