In our previous article, we demonstrated the four ways data collaboration can unlock more powerful, higher performing marketing. But to get started with data collaboration, brands and media owners first need to find a privacy-safe way to collaborate.
Many of the current solutions in the market are built on a single assumption - to conduct analysis across multiple data sets, personal data must be centralised and the data sets combined. An example of these types of centralised solution has been the Custom Audiences targeting offerings, provided by the walled gardens.
How data clean rooms unlock data collaboration
Data clean room emerged as a potential data collaboration solution. The theory was sound, data clean rooms could act as a Switzerland within an independent party’s environment where various data sources can be analysed as one.
Some of the most utilised of these solutions are those provided by the walled gardens. Google’s Ads Data Hub, for example, allows a company to upload their first-party data into Google’s environment where it can be matched against Google’s various data sources.
However, these solutions do not hold-up in a privacy-first world. As we have just outlined, these solutions require data to be centralised in the third-party’s environment, Google in the above example. The moment this happens, the personal data of each customer is at risk of exposure, and the commercial potential of the data has moved from the original collector to the data clean room provider.
Over the last couple of years, we have seen a shift in how companies look at their customer data. More and more customer-centric companies are unwilling to allow their first-party data to be centralised with other parties data, even those who claim to be a “safe haven”. This shift has come down to two factors:
- A desire to protect the privacy of their customers
- A requirement to protect the commercial value of their data assets
This shift has created challenges for traditional data collaboration solutions that rely on the centralisation of various datasets to drive insights.
However, with our pioneering decentralised marketing infrastructure, InfoSum delivers a data clean room that is designed to provide an environment where analysis can be conducted across any number of first, second and third-party data sources, without requiring any personal data to be shared between the parties.
Why a decentralised approach is so important
Decentralisation is creating a new future for data collaboration between brands, media owners, platforms and other enterprise businesses. By removing the need to share any personal data between these parties, you remove all the privacy, security and trust barriers that have hindered collaborative opportunities in the past.
Decentralised data clean room are the logical choice for companies requiring a privacy-first, commercially trusted environment to collaborate in. ITV is one such forward-thinking company, which recently sat down with InfoSum to discuss their goals and objectives for data collaboration (see the recent guest blog from Lara Izlan here).
With InfoSum, ITV is making its 32 million ITV Hub users available for brands to match their own first-party data against. Through this analysis, brands are able to build custom audiences and target their own customers on ITV. Through InfoSum’s decentralised technology, which utilises differential privacy techniques, this can all take place without either ITV or the brand ever having to transfer or commingle customers personal data with the other party.
Through a decentralised data clean room, data collaboration can finally reach its full potential. High performing marketing can be delivered and accurately measured, with each company retaining full control of their data, and prioritising the privacy of their customers.
