In the fast-paced world of marketing, businesses are constantly striving to gain an edge, often at the expense of their most valuable asset – customer data. Pursuing higher match rates, increased scale across questionable real-time bidding (RTB) media, and the elusive "single customer view" have led to businesses sacrificing the one competitive advantage that truly matters – a stable customer relationship.
Marketers today are operating within the confines of technology, where the potential of customer data remains largely untapped. Current data onboarding solutions, designed to get data from point A to point B to activate it across the advertising ecosystem, are built on a pre-requisite for Personal Identifiable Information (PII) data to be shared, centralized, and commingled within a third-party environment. This process, often called crosswalks, has been considered acceptable for far too long. However, with a heightened focus on data privacy both from consumers and businesses, organizations are eliminating practices and processes that risk the privacy of their customers.
Data Clean Rooms emerged as a powerful solution to enhance customer experience, create value, and protect privacy. However, data clean rooms are not a silver bullet to all the industry's challenges. By design, data clean rooms deal with data at an aggregate and anonymous level. While this protects consumer privacy, it limits the full power of more complex data-driven use cases.
InfoSum's data clean room has already proven itself to be the fastest and most secure solution for data collaboration. We provide businesses with unparalleled flexibility, having eliminated the constraints within the clean room environment, giving clients the freedom to choose identity resolution options and maintain absolute control over data usage.
But we envision a future where the same privacy, security, ubiquity and control extend beyond the data clean room itself into everyday business practices.
Introducing Private Path
Private Path is a first-of-its-kind solution that combines the security and control of clean room technology with the simplicity and scale of traditional data onboarding and crosswalks. Private Path preserves privacy while enabling the secure exchange of enriched intelligence for advanced analytics and measurement. Unlike legacy solutions that centralize and commingle persistent identity data such as email, phone number, MAID or other PII, Private Path eliminates this need entirely.
The core innovation of Private Path lies in its patented synthetic ID generation capabilities. Rather than relying on a persistent identifier or a hashed piece of PII, Private Path replaces all PII with a point-in-time synthetic ID. Several critical technical qualities are worth noting:
- Point-in-Time: These synthetic IDs are temporary and unique to each collaboration. So, when Company A collaborates with Company B, alistair@email.com gets a distinct synthetic ID. But if Company A partners with Company C, alistair@email.com will have a different synthetic ID. Even if Company A and Company B collaborate again, alistair@email.com will receive a different synthetic ID once more.
- Common: Exporting the same identifier from different Bunkers will generate a consistent synthetic ID across exports from various parties involved in the specific collaboration, eliminating the necessity for intricate mapping tables.
- Irreversible: It is technologically impossible to reverse engineer these synthetic IDs to re-identify the original PII - even by InfoSum. This means that consumer privacy is never put at risk.
Private Path enables organizations to collaborate with any number of partners to use first-party data to maximize scale, reach, accuracy, and intelligence without sacrificing security or privacy. Additionally, organizations never risk their competitive edge with Private Path. Unlike traditional solutions, neither InfoSum nor any undisclosed third party gains value from your data.
Private Path enables organizations to execute enrichment, measurement, and optimization strategies across their existing technology stack, leveraging the best components of their existing investments with greater safety, speed and effectiveness.
- Safety: With privacy regulations tightening their grip worldwide, the security of personal data is paramount. Private Path addresses this concern by removing all personally identifiable information (PII) from the data and replacing them with synthetic IDs. This transformation supports compliance with stringent privacy regulations and instills confidence that customer data is handled responsibly.
- Speed: Speed is of the essence in today's marketing landscape. Private Path accelerates the execution of use cases to a remarkable degree. These use cases can now be executed in minutes and seconds, enabling instant data enrichment and continuous measurement tracking throughout a campaign, not just post-campaign. This speed is a game-changer in a world where real-time decisions drive success.
- Effectiveness: InfoSum's platform empowers multiple parties to collaborate seamlessly, amplifying the effectiveness of data-driven strategies. Enabling one or more identity and data enrichment partners to participate in a single collaboration dramatically increases the reach and depth of insights. Private Path also offers the capability to leverage best-in-class third-party vendors, work with leading measurement providers, and tap into existing Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) for planning. This multifaceted approach ensures businesses can extract the maximum value from their data partnerships.
Private by default
Our principles at InfoSum not only enable organizations to execute their current use cases safer, faster, and more effectively but also ensure the protection of user data. This commitment is evident in three key ways:
- Avoid User Profile Creation: Private Path safeguards against creating user profiles by preventing any data recipient from understanding the end-user or building profiles from individual users. This measure guarantees the privacy of user identities through the use of synthetic IDs specific to a particular collaboration.
- Ensure Consumer Privacy Protection: Private Path offers ironclad assurances to all parties involved. Raw identifiers cannot be derived from the synthetic versions, not even by InfoSum. The synthetic IDs cannot be recreated, adding an extra layer of security and privacy protection.
- Avoid Cross-Site Tracking: In a world where data often traverses multiple platforms and media owners, cross-site tracking can significantly threaten consumer privacy. Private Path addresses this by designing each synthetic ID to be collaboration-specific, preventing advertisers from drawing insights from one media owner's audience and applying them to another. This ensures consumer data stays where it belongs, protecting privacy while fostering data collaboration.
In essence, Private Path isn't just a tool; it promises to uphold privacy, accelerate decision-making, and empower businesses to thrive in an era where data is the currency of success.
A new era of privacy-first measurement
We are initially deploying Private Path to solve one of the industry's most consistent challenges - accurate, reliable and transparent measurement of campaign performance. Private Path enables brands, media owners, retailers and other parties to safely exchange outcome and impression data without sharing PII or identifying keys. With this exchange, companies can easily calculate reach and frequency, incremental lift, and attribution without exposing sensitive transaction data.
Consider the scenario where a CTV media owner aims to provide valuable insights on their CPG client's campaign performance, striving to deliver in-flight optimizations that maximize ROI and ROAS. The challenge arises when neither the CTV provider nor the CPG brand can directly access the sales transaction data necessary to calculate the incremental lift and sales impact generated from the CTV organization's media efforts. Traditionally, in such a predicament, one company would need to relinquish control and potentially compromise privacy by sharing sensitive identity data such as names, phone numbers, or email addresses with the other party or an intermediary third party.
Private Path transforms this process. All parties involved can collaboratively select and share their data without exposing any underlying identity information—only the insights matter. These insights can then be securely delivered to a neutral or pre-agreed endpoint, enabling the calculation of lift and incremental impact without ever sharing PII or identity data.
The future of Private Path
Beyond its initial use cases in measurement, the possibilities for Private Path are boundless. InfoSum extends an invitation to companies to join this journey and explore how Private Path can revolutionize not only advertising but also various data-driven industries and processes.
Unlocking the full potential of data requires the courage to think beyond conventional boundaries and embrace a future where privacy and innovation go hand in hand. Private Path represents a paradigm shift in data collaboration, offering the control and protection businesses need to drive performance and thrive in the data-driven landscape of today and tomorrow.
Learn more about Private Path.
