Making privacy more human

Crossing the privacy chasm

For too long, privacy has been somebody else’s problem or responsibility. Not any more. Way beyond regulatory compliance, poor privacy strategies and experiences are impacting businesses

Like all great companies, Privacy Experience Agency was formed out of frustration. 2019 and the rush to base level GDPR compliance was over. Companies had scrambled to meet the baseline. The question was – ‘now what?’. We’ve seen a technology boom in privacy. Companies promising to automate your way to better privacy, back-office focused on process. We’ve seen legal teams move to ensure the businesses are protected best they can.

What we were not seeing was anyone thinking about the focus of the law – people.

Businesses are built by customers or Data Subjects. Yet no-one in privacy and data protection was seeing the advantages of a privacy strategy and program based on people.

The biggest businesses in the world spend a fortune on marketing and advertising to acquire and retain customers. Those customers provide the waterfall of data that all businesses now rely on to monetise. Yet, privacy was only a compliance effort. A ‘cost’ not an ‘investment’. A cost to minimise. That data supply is now at risk.

PEA was formed to help companies navigate the ‘next’ of privacy. How to protect future revenues, help transformation programs put privacy at the heart and how to use research to understand customers attitudes and expectations to privacy.

Cross the chasm

”PEA look at privacy in a totally different way to everyone else. Not a big, faceless consultancy, but small and expert like no-one else in privacy and data protection.

Calum LiddleDPO

Our Founders

Since March 2020 Lee and Chad have not met in person. We have no idea whether we still look like this.

Chad Wollen

Chad Wollen

Co-Founder

Chad has been at the forefront of all things customer-centered digital for 25 years. Working at WPP’s world famous Henley Centre gave Chad a grounding in understanding and predicting consumer behaviour. He left when they asked him to row to work.

Roles at Yahoo AOL, ITV and Vodafone, where Chad had a mix of customer insight, marketing strategy, innovation and analytics responsibilities, put him in the midst of the opportunities offered by data and digital platforms.

Whilst at Vodafone, Chads experience and interests with customers, data and innovation came to the fore as Global Head of Permissions Management. The opportunities offered by data could not be unlocked without a new customer and brand driven approach to Privacy.

Over coffee and cake at the Tate Modern, Chad and Lee founded PEA, where Chad works with our global clients to conduct research, deliver strategies and create privacy experiences and communications – all to embed the voice of the data subject into privacy.

Picture of Lee Woodard

Lee Woodard

Co-Founder

Lee has always suspected that Arthur Dent really had it nailed with thinking a lot about tea and not understanding Thursday's. This general state of confusion has seen Lee train as a potter and then retrain in digital media at the time when it wasn't even a thing. Luckily, digital turned out to be more than a fad.

In 1994 digital felt like a frontier now privacy feels very much the same, A seismic change is coming. PEA was created to help drive this change.

Years of senior and executive positions across agencies and client-side later and I'm still very unsure of Thursday's.

Making Privacy More Human

Based in London but with clients the world over.