In today’s dynamic e-commerce landscape, online advertising is a fundamental element of success for businesses selling products and services online. It empowers businesses, and especially smaller ones, to connect with genuinely interested consumers, and ultimately scale up. Personalised advertising, in particular, plays a critical role in ensuring that consumers are shown relevant content while enabling businesses to optimise their limited marketing budgets. This ability to effectively reach potential customers through digital channels is not merely an advantage, it is a prerequisite for innovation, competition, and sustained economic growth.
State of play of the legal framework
The EU’s online advertising legislative framework is highly complex, with legal provisions dispersed across multiples pieces of legislation, including the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), ePrivacy Directive (ePD), Digital Services Act (DSA), Artificial Intelligence Act, Digital Markets Act (DMA), the wider consumer acquis, guidance from the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) and various national Data Protection Authorities (DPAs). In addition to well-established industry tools in place playing an important role of self-regulation.
While new initiatives such as the upcoming Digital Fairness Act (DFA) and Digital Omnibus under development, the current legislative framework already encompasses a lot of aspects of digital advertising and presents significant compliance challenges for businesses. The primary challenge does not lie in the absence of rules, but rather in their confusing interplay and inconsistent implementation across jurisdictions. We therefore believe that new rules should only be considered if, and only after, a thorough impact assessment properly identifies specific issues and legal gaps, and demonstrates their strict necessity, proportionality, and avoidance of redundancies and regulatory overlaps. Existing rules however, would benefit from greater clarification and alignment in line with the EU’s Better Regulation and Simplification principles.
Ecommerce Europe key asks for a future proof framework
- Maintain the ability of e-commerce players to offer personalised advertising while ensuring appropriate consumer protections.
- Reduce regulatory complexity by aligning future cookie rules with the legal bases of Article 6 GDPR, and clarifying existing frameworks.
- Unlock innovation and Privacy Enhanced Technologies (PETs) adoption by allowing the usage of PETs without strict consent requirements and developing a common, interoperable PET infrastructure for advertising.
- Expand the definition of “essential cookies”, and ensure consistent consent exemptions and requirements across the EU while maintaining a cautious approach to centralised user control systems.
If you want to learn more, you can read the full position paper here.