The CMP as the next CMS

The CMP acronym has been gaining popularity in GDPR compliance recently as businesses look for consent management platforms and their developers, consent management providers. Since the acronym has yet to achieve a common understanding among those who use it, I have seen CMP used as shorthand for both concepts in media articles and by businesses operating in GDPR consent management.

The term is already starting to remind me of another popular acronym in digital marketing from the last few years: CMS (content management system). A CMS manages the creation and modification of digital content. Although the first systems dated back into the early 1990s, they rose to popularity in website development in the early 2000s as WordPress (and several other systems) began a meteoric rise and soon anyone could quickly and easily publish online thanks to the famous 5-minute install. WordPress is now used on more than 30% of websites on the internet.

The rise of the CMS eliminated one of the biggest problems on the internet: pages were built one at a time in HTML and then uploaded to a web host to be served. A CMS like WordPress, alternatively, allowed users/writers/bloggers/publishers to log in to the back end of the platform, type their content into the WYSIWYG editor and then hit publish. Upon publication, the system automatically linked it to past posts via its addition to the blog, sidebar or appropriate index categories specified. In essence, this brought website development within the grasp of hundreds of thousands of hobbyists that were soon referred to as bloggers.

Consent for marketing seems ripe for disruption in the same way that website development was ready to fundamentally change following the dot com bubble and bust. People have come to expect much more from popular businesses than a weekly or monthly newsletter. And consumers really do want to be able to tell businesses their preferences in order to get what they want. The single option monthly email newsletter opt-in or the request for blanket permission to send text messages on behalf of a business probably isn’t going to cut it with consumers for too much longer. It leaves consumers forced to live with untargeted marketing, an overwhelmed inbox, or no marketing from the business at all. It’s just not a good system currently.

The European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is giving many companies a push in the right direction, although much is still up in the air on how it will be handled in practice and what the enforcement by the data protection authorities will look like.

Will the CMP eventually come to stand for Consent Management Platform or Consent Management Provider? It just isn’t clear at the moment. But it probably doesn’t matter. Ultimately, whether the P refers to the software or the company probably it isn’t a big issue one way or the other. In reality, CMP might eventually come to stand for consent marketing platform in marketing circles if it comes to change the way marketers get consent. Because that is really what the IAB Europe is looking to do with its framework for providers to plug their systems into to help advertisers establish GDPR compliance.

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Other Blog Posts on Consent:

France’s CNIL Gives Record GDPR Fine of $57 Million to Google
UK, Austria Differ on Whether Consent is Freely Given if the Choice Has a Small Fee
CNIL Warnings Providing Insight into GDPR Consent Management
Report Urges Transparency and Consent Management for IoT Privacy
Gather Consent Methodically and Precisely for Special Data and Children
What Does Consent Really Mean Under GDPR?