What evidence do auditors commonly ask for on A.2.2.4 Marketing and advertising use?

Contract terms addressing marketing and advertising use; Evidence of prior consent where such use occurs, traceable to the individual; Evidence that consent is not a condition of service; Documented compliance with the customer's contractual requirements on this point.

What is the most common gap auditors find on A.2.2.4?

Marketing use permitted by a broad clause in standard terms, with no consent behind it

ISO/IEC 27701:2025 · Annex A Table A.2 PIMS controls for PII processors

`A.2.2.4` Marketing and advertising use

The organization must not use personal data it processes under contract for marketing or advertising unless it has confirmed that the individual concerned gave consent beforehand, and it must not make that consent a precondition of the service. It must document how it meets the customer's contract terms, particularly where marketing or advertising is intended, and it should not press for marketing or advertising uses to be included where explicit consent has not been obtained fairly.

Source: ISO/IEC 27701:2025, A.2.2.4. The statement above is our statement of the clause, read from the published text and cited so you can check it against the official text, not the instrument verbatim. Open ISO/IEC 27701:2025 in the compliance library.

artefacts

held by a system

at each review

hard

to go live

Data governance / DLP tooling

where the evidence lives

teal = a system already holds it · olive = produced at each review. To go live: easy when half or more of the artefacts are already held by a system, moderate from a quarter to a half, hard below a quarter.

These are the artefacts auditors commonly ask for on this requirement, our guidance rather than text from the standard. Your assessor decides what is sufficient in your context, and asks for samples across the period when a report covers one.

system holds itEvidence a system already holds

none for this control

periodic reviewEvidence produced at each review

Evidence of prior consent where such use occurs, traceable to the individual · Data governance / DLP tooling
Evidence that consent is not a condition of service · Data governance / DLP tooling

governing documentDocuments that govern the control

Contract terms addressing marketing and advertising use · Vendor register / contract repository
Documented compliance with the customer's contractual requirements on this point · Document repository

First move

No system holds this evidence for you: it is people and documents. Reminders and routing to the owner still save time. Put the document under version control with an owner and review date, and log each review as a record with reviewer and date.

Common gaps auditors find

Marketing use permitted by a broad clause in standard terms, with no consent behind it
Consent bundled into service acceptance, making it a condition of receiving the service
Consent obtained by the customer and assumed by the processor without evidence
Analytics or profiling for the organization's commercial benefit treated as service improvement rather than marketing

Do this for your whole sheet

Paste the rows you run your controls from and get this mapping for every control at once, with the periodic-review ones flagged and a first move per row. No account for the first run.

Build my evidence sheet

A.2.2.3 Organization’s purposes · A.2.2.5 Infringing instruction