How Immediate leverages Sourcepoint Compliance Monitoring to Drive Proactive Data Protection

Immediate is home to some of the biggest and most loved lifestyle brands in the UK, including Radio Times, Good Food, Nutracheck, HistoryExtra and BBC Gardeners’ World Magazine. Immediate is part of BurdaInternational, the international arm of Hubert Burda Media, one of Germany’s largest technology and media companies. A family company with a history spanning more than 100 years, Burda combines traditional publishing with digital innovation and invests in new and emerging digital business models.

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“Through Sourcepoint’s technology and expertise, we’ve been able to move from a reactive to a much more proactive privacy strategy.”

– Matthew Rance, Head of Commercial Data & Analytics, IMMEDIATE

The Privacy Landscape

The increasing number of data privacy laws and growing regulation from data protection authorities highlight the need for heightened privacy and compliance awareness among publishers.

Regulations such as GDPR, PECR, and emerging frameworks continue to evolve, putting pressure on publishers to ensure transparency around data usage, prioritize user consent, and comply with privacy standards. This shift is prompting many publishers to move beyond viewing privacy as a legal obligation and instead embrace it as a strategic opportunity to build trust with users, differentiate their brand, and mitigate regulatory risks.

Understanding Tech Partners and Building Trust with Users

Immediate quickly adapted to the evolving privacy landscape, viewing Sourcepoint’s compliance monitoring and scanning tool, Diagnose, as a core element of their business strategy, rather than just a checkbox. They recognized consent as a powerful tool that goes beyond monetization, empowering users with control over their personal data. To encourage user consent, advertisers and publishers must focus on building trust and offering clear value propositions. “Through Sourcepoint’s technology and expertise, we’ve been able to move from a reactive to a much more proactive privacy strategy,” said Matthew Rance, Head of Commercial Data & Analytics at Immediate.

Vendor List Curation

A key initiative for Immediate has been curating their vendor list. When the IAB introduced the Transparency and Consent Framework (TCF), the fragmented landscape made tracking vendors difficult. To ensure compliance many publishers added the entire IAB Global Vendor List (GVL), which included over 1,000 vendors. While this protected against undeclared technologies, it also negatively impacted performance and contradicted GDPR’s data minimization principle, which requires only collecting relevant and necessary personal data.

Immediate used Diagnose’s ‘Disclosed vendors’ metric, which tracks the number of vendors disclosed via the CMP over a selected period. Initially, upon integrating the CMP, Immediate inherited a default vendor list of over 800 vendors. The team began their process of curation by looking at one specific dimension of disclosed vendors, prevalence.

What’s vendor prevalence?

Vendor prevalence measures how frequently a third-party technology appears on your digital properties. In Sourcepoint Diagnose, it represents the percentage of scans where that vendor is detected over a specified time period.

Key Thresholds
• High prevalence (20%+): Consistently active vendors with significant impact
• Low prevalence (0-10%): Rarely triggered vendors that may be candidates for removal

Why It Matters
Prevalence data helps organizations optimize their vendor ecosystem by identifying which partners genuinely add value. This enables better compliance with data minimization principles while maintaining revenue performance.

Benchmark Comparisons
Our unique benchmark prevalence metrics allow you to compare vendor activity on your properties against industry averages. This reveals potential revenue opportunities where vendors have higher prevalence on competitor sites but lower presence on yours.

The Immediate team used the dashboard to identify the prevalence of these vendors across their properties during the selected periodisation, and tracked the low prevalence scores over several months to ensure the vendors were consistent in their inactivity.

Any vendors with a prevalence below 1% were batch removed from their vendor list. Batch removal allowed Immediate to monitor any revenue impact before continuing. The first round of vendor removal consisted of over 400 vendors. This significant reduction had no observed revenue impact, allowing Immediate to trust in DIagnose’s data and further remove vendors.

Immediate then used Diagnose to decide which vendors should be removed next, balancing the potential risk of some revenue loss with the desire to improve overall privacy and data provenance on their properties.

““We’ve made considerable improvements to implement a more robust data collection system, for example, by significantly reducing the number of vendors we work with to reflect only those that are additive, address matters relating to the sequencing of data collection and downstream usage on our sites whilst also implementing improved data collection designs for our consumers,” said Rance.

Immediate began this project with over 800 vendors disclosed in their CMP. They have now reduced this number to 100 partners, without any revenue impact.

In fact, reducing the number of vendors reduces the size TC String which improves website speed and loads ad faster, since ad partners now receive the consent string more quickly.

Proactive Compliance Practices

Immediate has proactively addressed the growing complexity of new and existing data privacy regulations with a new initiative. Specifically, they have been working on an internal ‘Privacy and Compliance Tracking Program’ that allows them to ensure ongoing monitoring, documentation and management of privacy and compliance practices within their organization specific to digital advertising given its size and complexity.

Documentation is mainly centered on Immediate’s efforts to identify potential compliance vulnerabilities, curating vendor lists, and ensuring adherence to data protection standards. They use Diagnose metrics such as ‘vendors triggered prior to consent’ and ‘non disclosed vendors observed’ to identify any vulnerabilities and example actions taken to mitigate non compliance across their sites.

“Following the introduction of new data privacy laws, increased data protection regulation and growing market concerns around data quality and signal loss, publishers need to monitor and refine their data collection practices with a greater level of rigor and scrutiny than previously,” said Rance.