Devrun
June 25, 2025
Compliance and security are no longer back-office concerns, they now shape how marketing operates and scales. As of June 2025, stricter regulations like GDPR, CCPA, and Law 25, combined with rising user expectations, are forcing organizations to rethink how they collect and activate data. Nowhere is this more evident than in consent management. What was once a legal checkbox is now a growth lever. Consent strategy influences how audiences are built, how tools activate data, and how campaigns are delivered.
Adobe’s June 10, 2025 update to Experience Platform (AEP) and Real-Time CDP reframes consent as a strategic asset. When orchestrated across the MarTech stack, including Adobe Analytics and Adobe Launch, consent becomes actionable, enforceable, and key to delivering compliant, personalized experiences.
Marketing teams today operate in an environment where data access is increasingly conditional. Legacy approaches often fail to scale across channels or sync in real-time, creating gaps in activation and audit risk. Consent is the gatekeeper, it controls what you can collect, how you can activate it, and ultimately, how your campaigns perform.
Adobe’s vision focuses on making opt-ins easier to earn and more valuable once secured. Let’s explore how Adobe turns consent into a growth lever through these pillars;
Organizations must move beyond static cookie banners. Adobe promotes dynamic, “just-in-time” consent prompts based on user actions across channels, from web visits to email clicks and in-app engagement. These prompts can be triggered through event-based logic in tag managers (like Adobe Launch or GTM), using rule-based triggers that combine scroll depth, click tracking, and CMP consent states. This reduces friction, improves relevance, and elevates opt-in rates.
MarTech Expert Tip
For advanced implementations, server-side tagging setups (e.g., server-GTM or server-side Adobe Launch) can be used to manage consent enforcement centrally. This approach prevents data leakage from client-side errors and allows businesses to dynamically decide which events are forwarded to analytics or activation tools based on real-time consent status, adding a critical layer of security, performance, and privacy governance to the MarTech infrastructure.
Objective: Only send events if valid consent is present.
With third-party cookies disappearing, companies must rely on first-party identifiers like email, preferences, and behavior history. Consent isn’t just legal permission, it builds data trust and fuels segmentation and personalization.
Without a consent-linked identity strategy, data becomes fragmented, hurting audience matching and personalization. This requires progressive profiling, securely storing identifiers in a unified identity graph, and linking them to consent via a real-time API or CMP. These identifiers are then activated across systems such as Adobe Real-Time CDP, CRM, and personalization engines, with consent flags controlling what flows into segmentation. Adobe Real-Time CDP’s Identity Service resolves identifiers (ECID, email, phone) under one profile, but only if consent permits merging and activation. Identity stitching must honor user permissions at every step.
Once consent is obtained, it must be traceable, auditable, and synchronized across platforms. Adobe enforces consent at activation gates through profile-level flags and segment conditions. Consent state also governs outbound data sharing to external destinations.
Adobe Real-Time CDP enables activation only if consent has been granted, allowing marketers to confidently personalize without risk of overreach. Consent is no longer passively stored, it becomes actionable and enforceable across the stack.
To achieve this, organizations must align their tools and infrastructure to respect consent at every layer of the MarTech stack. Here’s how Adobe’s tools and supporting systems coordinate to ensure consent is respected and auditable across every layer:
Aligning MarTech Infrastructure for Consent Compliance
Integrating consent into MarTech operations is no small task. Tags, CDPs, CRMs, DSPs, they all need to align on what data can be used, where, and when. Adobe’s strategy reinforces that this alignment must happen in real-time and be automated at scale.
Managing consent across tools requires event syncing, data layer consistency, and real-time propagation to avoid race conditions or unauthorized triggers.
This requires:
For security and compliance teams, this alignment provides a new layer of visibility and control. For marketing teams, it delivers the agility needed to operate at speed, without sacrificing privacy.
The stakes are high: inconsistent consent enforcement can result in legal penalties, customer distrust, and broken campaign logic. But when done right, consent becomes a growth multiplier, enabling smarter targeting, more accurate reporting, and better ROI.
Companies that successfully embed consent into their MarTech stack see:
TSB Bank, a leading UK retail and commercial bank, used Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) and Real-Time CDP to overhaul how they managed customer data and consent across channels.
What they did
The Result
In 2025, compliance security, and marketing performance are fully connected. Consent is no longer just a legal function, it’s a cross-functional driver of audience growth and campaign impact.
Adobe’s strategy, powered by Experience Platform and Real-Time CDP, shows what’s possible when privacy is built into the core of your MarTech stack. The brands that win will treat consent not as a checkbox, but as a foundation for scalable, secure, and trusted marketing.
🔗 Sources:
Adobe Experience League:
Adobe for Business:
