Dear MarketingProfs,

I am applying for a Director of Digital Marketing position and I wanted to research national salary averages. I tried looking at salary.com and some other sites, but had no luck finding good information. I have five years of interactive/digital marketing experience, some of that being with a Fortune 500 company. Do you know what I could ask for? The company is located in Philadelphia.

Thanks,

Alfred

Dear Alfred,

You're in luck. Through hard experience, I've deduced the algorithm to figure out the likely salary such a company would be willing to pay. Roughly, the salary for a client-side director of digital marketing would start around $60,000. The director of digital marketing on the agency side is more of a management position, starting around $90,000.

If the company is a member of the Fortune 500, the salary would be increased 20 percent. If the company is business-to-business, or otherwise has increased relevance to online media, the salary should add yet another accretive 20 percent. If the company already has subordinate staff in place for digital marketing, add 25 percent.

If, however, the CEO of the company comes from a traditional brand management background (look particularly for former Proctor and Gamble low-levels), then subtract 15 percent. It's not that they won't necessarily appreciate what you do, but they'll require the position to go through at least some form of hazing.

If the company's media budgets get apportioned annually or on the basis of the seniority of the various directors of different forms of marketing, then subtract 30 percent from the salary total.

If the portfolio of duties for this position includes doing search engine optimization in-house, then subtract 20 percent. If it involves managing an agency relationship, add 20 percent.

This leaves you with a range from $28,560 (indicating the role is an over-blown title for an HTML Web monkey at a smaller firm) to $129,600 (a fair salary for an experienced online manager at a larger firm).

Dear MarketingProfs,

I have been reading up on privacy practices, and they are much more complicated than I originally thought—especially when marketing is shared between United States and European divisions.

My question is this: Which law governs when data concerning U.S. consumers gets captured on a U.S. Web site, then European workers process the data. The data is used only for marketing to consumers in the US. Does US law apply, EU law, or both?

Thanks!

Olive

Dear Olive,

Thank you for the fascinating question. This is a real stumper, so I queried two intellectual-property lawyers. Not surprisingly, the weasels refused to give any sort of a useful answer, so we're all apparently on our own until some case law comes into play. Sort of.

Here in the United States, at least, case precedents will help form the predictability we seek, because our law operates as a “common law” form, borrowed from England, one that tends to hew to past decisions. On the other hand, European Union (EU) law is not common law and is much more rules-based because of the “code” traditions stemming from France's 18th century military dictator, Bonaparte. Brussels could decide to clarify the matter quite whimsically, depending on how “grabby” it decided it wanted to be for control of such matters. Going by today's political winds, it's leaning toward the grabby side.

That said, it's clear from your question that the “transactions and occurrences” that make up the fact pattern of the scenario happened for the most part in America. The European element, according to your details, constitutes a mere information technology batch-processing job—hardly an important element to the story.

I'm fairly certain that a US court would find that it had jurisdiction. A European court would have a tougher time because, you must remember, someone must first sue for having been wronged. According to your scenario, the privacy data at question belongs to Americans, so it might be difficult for them to win “standing” to sue in a pan-European court, unless they sued the IT firm doing the processing (which seems just this side of outlandish, but certainly not unprecedented in our own litigious society on this side of the Atlantic).

On the other hand, while the militarily strong United States has relied on executive power to export its point of view internationally, the militarily weak nations of Europe have relied on domestic and international law proceedings to enforce their desires on others. Increasing the portfolio of international competencies of European courts is, in effect, the equivalent of increasing the military budget for free.

While some member countries bridle at federal control and will force the draft of the EU constitution to limit its domestic powers, all of the countries can happily agree to bind non-Europeans to their own preferences. That seems to be the current trend, especially in technology and anti-trust issues, where Europeans seem to feel that American commercial dominance needs to be actively countered.

This answer can only touch the surface of a few of the relevant facets. How this issue will find resolution in the future will have much to do with companies' deciding not to do business at all in Europe so as to avoid having to hew to onerous legal regimes. The European Union has yet to find that inflection point at which its influence increases as it expands its claimed powers and begins to recede due to the lack of acceptance of those claims. What I can tell you is that I don't want to have to be the one to pay the lawyers to find out.