About

Team size: Three

Major legal advisers: Bates Wells, Bird & Bird, Bristows, Davidson Chalmers Stewart, Dentons, Linklaters, Wedlake Bell

GDPR came into force in May 2018, overhauling legislation around personal information and how organisations, companies and individuals must protect it.

Marketing is one industry dramatically impacted by the reforms. The Data & Marketing Association (DMA), the largest not-for-profit industry body for marketing professionals in Europe for more than 1,000 members, including the BBC, Sky, HSBC, Specsavers and Samsung, hired its first GC, Asli Yildiz, not long after the landscape shifted.

Yildiz, a lawyer with experience in data privacy and cyber security at Taylor Wessing and in-house at Canon, was tasked with driving the industry response to data regulation and helping establish a best-practice code of conduct. The DMA’s legal team of three provides free, indemnified legal advice to its members, many of which have no legal team, on their marketing – it handled more than 2,500 enquires related to GDPR in less than a year.
Another big piece of work has been Yildiz’s contribution to an EU-wide marketing code of conduct, which she has helped draft alongside the Federation of European Direct and Interactive Marketing. This involved meeting with the European Commission and the French Data Protection Authority, with the code expected to be completed this year.

Unsurprisingly, Brexit also presented a big challenge in 2019. ‘We received hundreds of questions, mainly focusing on the transfer of data after Brexit,’ Yildiz comments. ‘We worked with various institutions to provide them with members’ views on Brexit and data transfer, including the legal and practical solutions to international data transfers from the UK to EU, post-Brexit.’

To bring all this guidance together, Yildiz established a legal and marketing hub for DMA members to provide a platform for representatives to meet and discuss matters affecting the marketing sector. ‘The hub helped to clarify many ethical and legal issues within the industry, and provide real-time solutions to common disagreements that can occur between legal and marketing departments,’ she adds. ‘This will also help reduce the legal costs of our members, who – particularly if they have limited legal resources and budget – will gain value from experience sharing at the hub.’