Add the term “privacy measurement” to your repertoire.
On Monday, consent management platform Sourcepoint launched a tool to help ad buyers make sure their media suppliers are up to snuff when it comes to privacy compliance, brand safety, brand suitability and data ethics.
Privacy Lens, as it’s called, uses scanning technology to measure how well a website or app is complying with regional privacy laws, which trackers it uses, whether it uses fingerprinting techniques, what data it collects, where that data goes, whether it’s got a user-friendly opt-out workflow in place and if it’s adhering to industry privacy standards and any specific parameters set by a brand or agency.
The tool, which Sourcepoint CEO and founder Ben Barokas said is complementary to more classic viewability and fraud solutions, such as DoubleVerify, Integral Ad Science and Moat, also logs every time a cookie is dropped (whether first- or third-party) and checks to see whether a publisher is properly using the IAB’s Transparency and Consent Framework and/or the IAB’s CCPA compliance framework where applicable.
Three agency holding companies are already using the technology. Omnicom’s media unit OMG participated in the six-month beta program and plans to be in market with Privacy Lens during the first half of this year.
The ethical use and management of data is becoming increasingly top of mind for advertisers as they scramble to keep up with a complex regulatory landscape. But it’s also about spending money in well-lit environments that align with a brand’s own ideals.
Purpose-driven marketing might be a buzz phrase, but there’s a lot more that brands can do to make sure their dollars are going to support worthy outlets.
Having a conception of data ethics will “enable brands to shift dollars based on their values,” said Megan Pagliuca, OMG’s chief activation officer.
“We want to bring our clients more understanding of the impact to consumers and the industry of their media spend,” Pagliuca said.
Privacy Lens will help OMG expand the inventory graph it makes available through Omni, its precision marketing and insights platforms, and do more inventory curation work for OMG clients, she said.
But it’s impossible to do that systematically without being able to measure a publisher’s performance against its level of privacy compliance and adherence to standards.
“That’s the only way enterprises can know who to do business with and which ecosystem partners are being conscientious about how users want to be treated and how data is passed from one place to another,” Barokas said.
But there has to be more nuance to how privacy compliance and data ethics are measured, because some aspects are nonnegotiable – like adherence to specific regulations – and other aspects are more of a gray area, such as brand suitability, risk tolerance level or the wording of a privacy policy.
“We don’t come in and mandate or dictate what rises to the level of a high-quality privacy experience, and we let clients define their own standards,” said Brian Kane, COO and co-founder of Sourcepoint. “We expect a continued need for subjectivity in how brands view privacy, compliance and data ethics.”
But one thing that isn’t subjective is the fact that advertisers increasingly want tools that help them prioritize consumer privacy while also allowing them to run data-driven campaigns.
In early February, for example, GroupM launched a product called Data Ethics Compass that informs ad buyers about the ethical risk level associated with certain data assets.
