When Ours, a telehealth service for couples counseling, launched in 2020, it wasn’t planning to eventually pivot to a health care-focused customer data and privacy compliance platform.
But that’s exactly what happened – and it was a surprisingly logical transition, according to Adam Putterman, CMO of Ours Privacy, the CDP business that emerged from Ours and now operates as a separate company.
“Because our focus was on relationship advice and marriage counseling, we were storing a ton of incredibly sensitive data right from the very beginning,” said Putterman, who co-founded Ours and also ran its marketing for a while.
“As you can probably imagine,” he said, “we took a really hard-line stance on security and privacy.”
But that made his job as CMO incredibly difficult.
Diagnosing the problem
Actually, scratch that.
Managing performance marketing for Ours was “pretty much an impossible task,” Putterman said.
Rather than run the risk of data leakage, Ours took what you might call a scorched earth approach to advertising. There wasn’t a single third-party script on its website.
“We pretty much went with a completely blind setup,” Putterman said. “We had nothing on the site: no pixels, no video, not even a Google Font.”
Not-so-fun fact: Google has a free, open-source library of hundreds of fonts that designers and developers can easily embed in their websites. But when a site loads a Google Font via Google’s servers, it automatically shares visitor data, including IP address, with Google and often without the person’s consent or knowledge.
When even the fonts on your website are a vector for privacy violations – well, that’s why we can’t have nice things.
But you also can’t effectively do user acquisition without at least some data-driven optimization.
“If you’re only doing things at the top of the funnel, it almost never works,” Putterman said.
And so Ours decided to build its own solution for privacy-safe targeting and analytics, relying on the expertise of Tyler Zey, one of the company’s co-founders and its CTO, who just so happened to have a solid background in mar tech.
Patient zero
The idea was to develop a tool for internal use only, and the concept is rather simple.
Instead of running lots of different scripts directly on its site, they developed a snippet of code to remove all third-party pixels and replace them with secure server-side connections to all of the ad platforms and analytics tools in their marketing stack.
Ours could then decide what data to share and what to hold back, and all of the information would be anonymized before it was sent.
The impact of being able to use data in the company’s marketing was almost immediate, Putterman said, including a significant reduction in the cost of customer acquisition.
It wasn’t long before several of its agency partners started asking if they could use the tool, too. They were persistent.
But the Ours team demurred and kept on demurring. The tool was just a workaround, they told whoever asked, and they were only using it for their own purposes.
“But after the fifteenth time it was, like, okay, maybe we need to do something more with this,” Putterman said.
The privacy puzzle
And they did.
Last year, Ours Privacy spun off as its own business and now has a full roster of clients, including health care marketers, large health systems, dental service organizations and other telehealth providers.
Ours Privacy has also been rounding out its feature set, including a web scanner that automatically detects third-party scripts to identify possible compliance risks and a HIPAA-compliant video player that doesn’t send viewer data from embedded videos.
In July, Ours Privacy raised a second round of funding, which was led by Rock Health, and launched a consent management platform, which a lot of its customers had been asking for.
“Collecting data and sharing data are only two parts of the puzzles,” Putterman said. “Getting the proper consent and making the proper disclosures are very important precursors to both, and it’s a huge challenge in health care right now because of all the new state privacy laws.”
And the regulatory heat is only going to rise, especially for companies that handle sensitive consumer information.
“The macroenvironment isn’t changing,” Putterman said. “If anything, regulators are getting more aggressive.”
🙏 Thanks for reading! Here’s a semi-topical cat and, as always, feel free to drop me a line at allison@adexchanger.com with any comments or feedback.
