The Coalition for Privacy Compliance in Digital Advertising (or short: CPCA) is known as an NGO, established with an objective to better align businesses’ practices in digital advertising with privacy-focused laws and regulations.
What is CPCA dedicated to?
Founded in 2024, CPCA describes the organization’s main goal as the establishment of the so-to-speak “level-playing field” for all players in the online advertising ecosystem, keeping end users’ privacy rights protected, while also providing maximum clarity to key stakeholders on the Supply and Demand sides, on whether their businesses remain fully compliant with privacy regulations, hence improving their value proposition and also ensuring the fair competition on the market.
Key CPCA Initiatives
As of the beginning of 2025, one of the major CPCA initiatives implies their collaboration with the Information Commissioner’s Office (or short: ICO) to develop the common privacy certification for digital ad tech businesses in the UK to ensure maximum certainty, regarding their compliance with the UK’s GDPR.
The collaboration also involves the input by the country’s industry bodies, i.e. ISBA and the AOP, and once developed, the criteria for the certification will undergo the audit by the UK’s Audit Bureau of Circulation, prior to their final approval by the ICO.
As expected, the finalized criteria will be publicly released in the first months of 2025, with the full certification launch expected later in 2025.
Perspectives of the CPCA Certification Adoption
Even though the core goal behind CPCA’s privacy certification to establish the “level-playing field” in online advertising is comprehensive enough and is supposed to improve business outcomes for all stakeholders in the mid- and long-term perspective, it’s still unclear whether the organization will be able to achieve its prioritized adoption by ad tech businesses in the UK fast enough.
More importantly, if its release and implementation by the national market players takes much longer than expected, this might jeopardize CPCA’s plans to develop similar certifications for other countries in the EU, let alone have them adopted in the timely manner.