All Media Lions Ltd’s affiliate partners are ICO registered (or equivalent in their own country of operation) and have undertaken to operate in line with GDPR regulations should they hold UK & EU data.

Due Diligence and Control

We undertake due diligence on each affiliate before they are accepted onto our network and perform ongoing random spot checks including:

• Companies House check
  
• ICO number check
  
• Completion of on-boarding questionnaire by affiliate
  
• Website check to ensure privacy policy and opt-in consent (for emailers) complies with GDPR.
  
• Telephone ‘walk-through’ of our Network’s Terms & Conditions
  
• Signing of our network’s Terms & Conditions
  
• The obtainment of an affiliate’s full contact details to ensure we’re in primary contact with all our partners
• Ongoing opt-in consent spot-check

Any affiliate proven to be in contravention of Media Lions Ltd affiliate network’s terms and conditions is immediately expelled from our network. Additionally, all revenue that may have been generated from activity that contravenes our terms and conditions, is forfeited.

Email affiliates holding UK and EU data

Subscribers only receive marketing emails from third-party brands and marketing companies to which they consented during their subscription. The marketing companies’ names and offers’ industry sectors are clearly named in the website’s privacy policy from which consent was obtained.

Emailers are also able to identify exactly when and where a subscriber opted-in and what IP address an individual used during their subscription. No contact is marketed to if they haven’t engaged or consented within the past 6 months.

Every time a customer receives an email from an affiliate partner, they’re given the opportunity to opt-out from future marketing emails. Emailers also operate a global unsubscribe policy, which means even if a person using a specific email address re-subscribes to any of our partners’ web properties, they will not receive any marketing emails.

Email affiliates holding non UK & EU data

All contacts within our affiliate partners’ customer databases are fully opted-in to receive third-party email marketing messages.  They are able to identify exactly when and where a subscriber opted-in and what IP address an individual used during their subscription.

Every time a customer receives an email from an affiliate partner, they’re given the opportunity to opt-out from future marketing emails. They also operate a global unsubscribe policy, which means even if a person using a specific email address re-subscribes to any of our partners’ web properties, they will not receive any marketing emails.

It should be noted that Media Lions Ltd has longstanding relationships with its email affiliates. Wherever possible we pass advertisers an affiliate’s ID via a dynamic variable in a tracking link. This ensures transparency and control.

Data Security

‘Suppression files’ of email contacts who’ve unsubscribed from specific campaigns and those on our global suppression file are updated daily and shared amongst all publishers via the UNSUB Central platform. This provides a fully secure and interlinked way to share suppressions and unsubscribes amongst our partners in real-time. Data is encrypted in Md5 hash format and publishers can only suppress these contacts via a secure key. This ensures Media Lions Ltd data handling procedures complies with GDPR.

As a footnote, Media Lions Ltd is keen to stress that it has successfully passed compliance audits with the some of the UK’s largest advertisers and agencies.