A Brighton company has managed to spin the utter dullness of GDPR updates into pure gold with a privacy policy so funny it’s gone viral – and provided them with a huge uptick in traffic and newsletter sign ups.
Writers’ HQ believes they must be the only company in the world to have ended up with thousands more people signed up to their newsletter as a result of the new European privacy regulations.
Over the past weeks, inboxes across Europe have become clogged up with begging opt-in emails which have gone straight into trash – but the creative writing course and retreat company’s sweary and irreverent message ended up being forwarded on and shared instead.
It told existing newsletter subscribers that ‘enthusiastic consent is sexy’ and that users should “hold on to your hats, mother**kers, this is going to be the shortest, clearest and best freakin’ privacy policy you ever did see.”
Two days ago, US privacy expert Debra J. Farber posted on Twitter that it was the most entertaining privacy policy that she had read, and by today the policy has had 3,300 shares and the page has been viewed over 22,000 times. Newsletter sign ups have also increased 15%.
Co-director of Writers’ HQ Sarah Lewis-Hammond, who wrote the policy, said they have been inundated with emails and social media messages from people saying how it was the only policy they actually read and the only newsletter they resubscribed to. They have even had to implement a licensing agreement as so many people wanted to use it for their websites.
Sarah said: “It’s crazy. We’ve published some really important, meaningful stuff on our site and this is the thing that gets the attention.
“We genuinely thought no one ever read the privacy policy. We’ve had emails from people all over the world saying thank you for the laughs. We’ve even had emails from lawyers working for global brands saying they wish they could do something similar.
“The lesson we’re taking from this is to be much more belligerent and say f*** a lot more when it comes to implementing trade legislation. Maybe the Brexit negotiating team should take note.”
