The current web of disconnected clean rooms is like rows and rows of magnets facing the same way, so nothing actually happens.
On Thursday, data intelligence platform InfoSum announced a new software, Platform Sigma, to try and give its clients a better way to share depersonalized data with each other and their data vendors of choice.
Platform Sigma is a user interface software built on cloud tech infrastructure providers, so businesses can store their encrypted data in what InfoSum calls “bunkers” for data matching, activation and measurement on the platform, said Devon DeBlasio, InfoSum’s VP of product marketing.
For example, a brand can bring its own first-party data and match it to a media owner with its own audience data (or broadcasters with household subscriptions) to scale that audience and control for frequency. Disney, which, last week, announced a clean room integration with The Trade Desk and has three clean room vendors – InfoSum, Habu and Snowflake – is one of the first companies to sign onto Platform Sigma.
A third-party measurement or identity provider could also use Platform Sigma’s infrastructure to build measurement incrementality or attribution models on top of InfoSum’s API, DeBlasio added.
InfoSum’s not the first data platform to incorporate software-as-a-service (SaaS) components into its offering to make clients’ clean rooms more interoperable.
The main idea is to “lower the barrier of entry” to safe clean room use cases in market by putting data-sharing tools in advertisers’ hands, said Slavi Samardzija, global CEO of Annalect, a data marketing and analytics division of Omnicom Media Group and another early adopter of Platform Sigma.
Mapping out measurement
Other than privacy concerns, InfoSum’s new platform was specifically meant to answer advertisers’ measurement demands.
“Over the past two years, we’ve seen a major change in how companies across the entire supply chain are using first-party data collaborations,” DeBlasio said. “And the major change revolves around measurement.”
The original and still core use case for clean rooms “was [always] measurement,” Samardzija said. From measurement comes insights, and from there it’s a short jump to activation.
Companies want to execute measurement solutions, but they need more complex data sets and interoperability to do so. And being able to plug seamlessly into partners and technology vendors with different clean room data tech is a “huge, critical component” of bringing advertiser demand to the idea, DeBlasio added.
Direct access to publisher data lets brands increase measurement granularity with more enriched data sets and log-level exposure data from publishers that guide their tech partners’ measurement models, which in turn leads to smarter and more efficient buys, DeBlasio said.
“We’re not a measurement company – but measurement has to happen,” he said. “We’re now allowing measurement organizations to use our API to build more advanced measurement models on top of our platform on behalf of their clients – or eventually monetize those models using our infrastructure.”
Play nice
InfoSum’s attribution potential value prop is clear. But reaching scale is a hazy proposition at best.
The solution can reach a level of scale once more media owners get onboard.
Meaning the more publishers sign on, the more inventory is available to brands. But it’s not clear if marketers will be able to use their matched audiences with publishing partners to scale audience beyond those publishers’ distribution footprints and onto the open web. One of the big advantages of third-party data is it enhanced open web campaigns, whereas first-party data-based products tend to favor closed models.
Larger publishers are protective of their data and don’t usually let it leave their own walls.
Disney’s new integration with The Trade Desk allows advertisers to scale their audiences against Disney’s first-party data with Unified ID 2.0 (UID2) IDs – across Disney properties only.
In the case of Platform Sigma, it’s “completely flexible” based on the permissions and controls each party grants. “Every organization within the platform has complete autonomy in terms of how their data is used,” DeBlasio said.
If Annalect wants to match its IDs with Disney’s through a private data network and scale that larger audience across the open web through an intermediary like, say, The Trade Desk, it could – but it’s Disney’s decision to allow it.
Disney declined to comment.
