With privacy restrictions tightening, agencies will have to step up their privacy practices this year.

Whether it is clean room technology or installing a privacy team, media agencies are faced with having to juggle emerging state regulations and expand their consumer protection efforts globally. While the U.S. has lagged behind regulating consumer privacy compared to the European Union, this year a handful of states will implement their own laws — from California to Connecticut.

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As Stacey Stewart, U.S. chief marketplace officer at UM, previously mentioned to Digiday, consumers are also getting savvier in understanding how they are tracked online with cookies. And with the increase of privacy laws, she said it made sense for UM to add a chief privacy officer in 2020 and a privacy lead member on each of its accounts. Stewart believes more agencies will have to spend more time working closely with legal as the laws evolve.

Arielle Garcia, chief privacy officer at IPG’s UM Worldwide, sits on the business side and said her role is a unique marriage of two fields within privacy and media agencies. She oversees compliance and client support, and increasingly agencies have developed or embedded privacy roles in their product or account teams.

“This has different flavors at different agencies,” Garcia said. “Either way, it takes someone that has both a strong understanding of regulations and is tracking those developments, but also understands adtech and the data flows … so you kind of need a marriage of both skill sets.”

Read more on Digiday.