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Last month, our team was joined in London by a group of experts and digital marketing practitioners for an exclusive breakfast session on the state of digital data in 2026.
Our very own James Ensor and Nial Ferguson were joined by Dan Truman (Duga Digital), Adam Taylor (Google), Mark Leach (Centre Channel), Imogen Collins (Genie Goals), Charles Bleach (Financial Times) & Tom Hobden (In Digital).
If you missed it, discover some of our takeaways and make sure to head to the end of the article to sign up for our next one.
Where does the UK stand with data protection in 2026?
Our Managing Director UK & Ireland, Nial Ferguson, opened the event with a look at the state of compliance and data protection in the UK, and a number that made the audience sit up a little straighter: Under the updated PECR framework, penalties now mirror UK GDPR, up to £17.5 million or 4% of global annual turnover, whichever is higher.
Even more telling was the statistic that 134 of the top 200 UK websites have received compliance letters from the ICO, with seventeen of those receiving preliminary enforcement notices. As the DUAA (Data Use and Access Act) continues to reshape the rules, the expectation of compliance remains, and the messsage from the ICO is that organisations treating consent as an afterthought are increasingly exposed.
For more information, check out our complete 2026 guide to data protection in the UK.
Building a foundation for reliable data
Next up was Dan Truman, Director of Duga Digital, with a session framed around a simple but uncomfortable question: when did you last check your own site as if you were an outside auditor?
His advice was practical and direct. First, act like an imposter by regularly auditing your dataLayer, pulling your GA4 channel reports, and checking for unexplained shifts in direct or unassigned traffic. Second, act like it's 2026 (because it already is) by running a parallel server-side GA4 setup alongside your client-side production setup and testing new consent methodologies in a staging environment before committing.
You won't get judged for broken tags. You get judged for broken decisions or poor performance.
- Dan Truman, Director of Duga Digital
The proof came shortly after. Mike West, Senior Director at In Digital, and and Charles Bleach, Digital and Performance Marketing Manager at the Financial Times, echoed the need to leverage modern solutions to solve modern problems, by bringing a real-world case study of what happened when an organisation implements server-side tracking properly.
The numbers spoke from themselves:
- Unassigned traffic dropped by 46%
- Unassigned registrations dropped by 79%
- Overall session uplift: +45%
- Returning user rate increased by 33%, thanks to an extended cookie tracking window
For anyone still questioning whether the investment is worth it, they make a fairly compelling case.
The data is there. You just need the right infrastructure to see it.
Measuring what actually matters
Imogen Collins, Head Of Client Strategy & Delivery at Genie Goals started off by articulating the difficulty that modern marketers are facing surrounding data, from increasingly complex privacy regulations to ad blockers, ITP, and ongoing changes to Chrome, all chipping away at the clean, deterministic picture that they used to rely on. Her answer isn't to chase perfect data, but to build four complementary pillars of clarity:
- In-platform metrics, what the platforms themselves report
- Topline revenue and profitability, the business-level signal that cuts through the noise
- Attribution modelling, a structured attempt to assign credit across channels
- MMM and incrementality testing, longer-horizon measurement that doesn't depend on individual-level tracking
Read her blog post published after the event to discover the breakdown behind her presentation:
As we move through 2026, data is only going to get fuzzier and the customer journey only more complex. The brands that will be best placed to grow are those investing in the right measurement foundations now, interrogating what their data is really telling them, rather than accepting whatever default view their dashboard serves up.
- Imogen Collins, Head Of Client Strategy & Delivery at Genie Goals (source: Genie Goals)
Mark Leach , Founder and Principal Consultant at Centre Channel, followed up with an analogy between the way businesses are measuring business performance and the effectiveness of a weather app to decide what to wear without a second thought:
Your board is asking "do I need a coat?" every week. If your answer looks like a meteorological dashboard, don't be surprised when they ignore it.
- Mark Leach , Founder and Principal Consultant at Centre Channel (Source: LinkedIn)
When the measurement system becomes too abstract for the people who need to act on it, no one invests and no one moves. The most elegant model in the world is worthless if it sits in a deck that nobody reads.
Google and the importance of data strength
Last but not least, Adam Taylor, Data Infrastructure Lead, UK at Google, offered a presentation on data strength, and the reasons why without the right data, content, and bidding signals, even the best AI is running on empty.
Data Strength is the comprehensive data setup that ensures the necessary input for Gemini to achieve the best ROI for your business.
Google's stated mission is to help marketers see and share their data easily for better return on ad spend, with guarantees that it's only used for the purposes they intend. Its new Data Manager is built around three priorities: improved performance, simplified setup, and privacy by default.
- Improved performance
- Simplified setup
- Privacy by default
Learn more on the Google website.
What we took away
The thread running through all sessions was consistent in highlighting that the gap between organisations that treat data and consent as operational necessities and those that treat them as strategic assets is widening, and fast. The fines are bigger. The tooling is better. The measurement frameworks are more sophisticated. And the expectations from regulators, customers, and platforms are all moving in the same direction.
Many fantastic takeaways from the session, my pick: The data is there. You just need the right infrastructure to see it.
- James Ensor, Head of Sales UK at Addingwell by Didomi (source: LinkedIn)
The businesses that come out ahead won't be the ones with the most data but the ones who know what to do with it, and who've built the infrastructure, the trust, and the compliance foundation to act on it.
The breakfast was a resounding success, and we're excited to meet you at our next one. To find the next Didomi event near you, head to our events page:
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