Marketing Cloud Next
Where Consent Lives in Marketing Cloud Next
Consent moves from Engagement's subscription model to platform consent records and Privacy Center — what that changes in practice.
- Consent
- Privacy
- Data 360
In Engagement, consent is a mixture: All Subscribers status, publication list subscriptions, sometimes a home-built preference data extension. In Next, consent is platform data — contact point records with an engagement channel and an opt-in or opt-out state — and privacy handling sits with Privacy Center.
What changes for the marketer
Less than you'd think day to day. You still import consent, you still respect it at send. What changes is that consent is now a first-class record on the same platform as everything else, so a service agent and a marketer are looking at the same fact rather than two systems with two opinions.
What changes for the architect
- Consent import is an explicit step in the quick start — it is not assumed to arrive with the contact.
- Channel-level consent means email and SMS are separate states, which is what regulators expected all along.
- If you run both Engagement and Next, decide which system is the source of truth for consent before anyone sends from both.
That last point is the one I'd write on the wall. Two systems each holding a partial opt-out state is how an unsubscribed person receives an email.
A small piece of advice
Write down, in one paragraph of normal English, how a person opts out and what happens next. If you can't, the configuration isn't finished, however green the setup screens look.