Alongside a fair sprinkling of lawyers and legal counsel, delegates at the event included compliance managers, privacy officers and even a manager of marketing preferences.
However, research indicates some businesses are not taking the issue seriously. Despite evidence from the DMA Consumer Research "Participation Media" showing consumers are becoming choosy about the messages they receive, many firms are failing to make good data protection practice a positive brand value.
Recent research from Marketing Improvement found that only 28 per cent of a sample of FTSE-100 companies could direct a telephone query requesting connection to the company's privacy officer to the correct person.
Researchers working on behalf of Opt-4 found many switchboards failed to locate a data protection compliance officer at all.
Worse still, few marketers seemed to know how many customers and prospects were opting out of receiving marketing communications. Most could give an opinion on whether opt-out rates were changing but few could provide precise information of how many people had asked not to be contacted or indeed any estimate of the financial consequence of this.
Very few researched companies seemed to have an accurate idea of whether customer and prospect attitudes to marketing communications were changing and, most importantly, what the future financial ramifications of any change might be.
So, while the Data Protection Conference showed that some DMA members are leading the compliance field, more big businesses will need to "walk the compliance walk" or suffer the consequences of consumer disaffection.
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