Think About How You’d Feel.
Charles Simon is VP of Private Advertising Standards at RTB House, where he shapes the privacy frameworks and industry standards that govern how advertising technology respects consumer rights. He brings experience from IAB Europe and a career spent inside the organisations that write the rules digital advertising actually runs on.
“Privacy is a trust asset, not just a legal liability. It is also about brand protection.”
Charles Simon is Vice President of Private Advertising Standards at RTB House, where he leads the shaping of internal and external privacy frameworks across the programmatic advertising ecosystem. With deep experience in IAB Europe and industry standards development, he works at the intersection of regulatory compliance, consumer trust, and competitive innovation.
Simon has spent his career at the intersection of advertising standards and consumer protection. His work on the Transparency and Consent Framework at IAB Europe put him at the centre of the GDPR-era transformation of how digital advertising handles consent. He has worked across European and US regulatory contexts, navigating the complexity of state-level privacy laws, walled garden data policies, and the ongoing evolution of contextual targeting.
At RTB House, his mandate is to ensure that the deep learning technology underlying the platform’s retargeting capabilities operates within frameworks that consumers can trust, regulators can respect, and clients can rely on. His test for any AI-driven advertising idea is simple: think about how you would feel as the person receiving it.
“Data governance is about trust between the advertiser and the user.”
The brands and platforms that built consent-based relationships early can now do things their competitors cannot.
Most organisations treat privacy as a compliance cost. Simon’s argument is that it is a competitive asset. The brands and platforms that built genuine consent-based relationships with consumers before they were forced to are now able to do things with data that competitors cannot. The constraint became the advantage.
Every regulatory wave and technology shift has produced new standards and new ways of reaching people that did not exist before.
The death of the cookie was supposed to be catastrophic. Third-party signal loss was supposed to collapse programmatic. Each of these moments produced new standards, new technologies, and new ways of reaching people that did not rely on the infrastructure being replaced. Simon is bullish on the industry’s ability to adapt because he has watched it do so repeatedly.
Think about how you’d feel if that experience happened to you.
In an era of Gen AI-enabled ad creation, the temptation is to optimise for click-through and conversion without asking whether the experience is one a person would welcome. Simon’s test is simple and impossible to automate: would you, as a human being, feel respected by this ad? That question cuts through most bad ideas fast.
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