Winterberry Group: Collaborative data solutions

Richard Foster
Thursday, January 14, 2021
Richard Foster
Thursday, January 14, 2021

“Companies have to work together to unlock data’s limitless potential, while also protecting and respecting sensitive customer information” - Brian Lesser, CEO and Chairman of InfoSum.

Today’s report from Winterberry Group, Collaborative Data Solutions: The Evolution of Identity in a Privacy-First, Post-Cookie World, not only pinpoints data collaboration as a vital ingredient in the future of the marketing industry, it also shines a spotlight on the need to ensure that any data collaboration solutions build trust not only between companies but also between those companies and their consumers. To achieve these dual goals, any new collaborative solutions must be privacy-by-design, putting the interests of people first. 

According to the Winterberry Group, 64.3% of US and 45.5% of UK companies are currently collaborating with other organizations, and a further 16.7% and 24.2% have plans to do so. This reflects a growing trend that InfoSum has helped pioneer, with more and more customer-centric companies looking to collaborate with other data-rich businesses.

Graph: Does your organization collaborate with any other organizations to share 1st party data for insights, activation, measurement or attribution?


But with great opportunity comes significant challenges. In the case of collaboration, these challenges often revolve around a lack of trust. Winterberry Group identified that trust is enabled through a combination of permission, provenance and governance. To achieve all three, it's important that companies move away from solutions that are dependent on the centralization and pooling of personal data (PII), and adopt solutions built instead upon the non-movement of data.  

The InfoSum solution, categorized as a Technical Data Environment in the Winterberry Group report, enables any number of companies to collaborate across any multitude of data sets without any movement of personal data between companies. This truly privacy-first approach unlocks powerful collaborative insights that can be used for planning, activation and measurement - while fully respecting the privacy of consumers at every step.

Emerging data collaboration themes

A key component of the Winterberry Group report are the six primary themes that will drive the infrastructure of marketing and advertising data collaboration. These are set out below along with a summary of InfoSum’s approach to each:

Theme Description InfoSum Approach
Permission-based Relationships Market adoption will be defined by permission-based frameworks – consumer to brand, brand to brand and brand to media owner Permissions have been central to the InfoSum platform since day one. Our permissions extend beyond simple company-to-company permission, empowering companies to even restrict the level of analysis available (down to the individual attribute). Additionally, due to our patented non-movement of data, permissions can be instantly revoked at any time without any loss of control or commercial value. 
Multi-Party Partnering With increasing solution flexibility, expanded use cases and the push for scale and accuracy, partnering becomes a requirement, not an option InfoSum’s infrastructure enables companies to collaborate both on a one-to-one basis, but also to create new customer data networks involving many different partners. In 2020 we saw multiple clusters  of media owners, brands, telecoms and data providers collaborating in a decentralized way to launch new data solutions and alliances. 
Multiple Solutions in Parallel Brands and media owners will implement multiple solutions – Winterberry Group expects to see no fewer than three to five per market participant  Collaboration extends beyond our platform - our goal is to remain entirely agnostic, enabling InfoSum to partner with best-of-breed companies in order to enhance our clients’ technology stacks.  Over the last 18 months, we have partnered with some of the biggest holders of authenticated data sets globally, ranging from telcos and gaming platforms to market leaders in the fields of marketing services and identity resolution and created the world’s largest de-centralised first party data ecosystem.
Solution Applications Across Clouds Delivery of real-time intent across and through shared environments The InfoSum platform is cloud-agnostic, enabling our Bunker technology to be deployed in any cloud infrastructure. This agnosticism enables collaboration between customers working in different cloud environments. Because of InfoSum’s de-centralised approach, running analysis across multiple Bunkers deployed across multiple Bunkers, takes seconds not hours or days. 
Organizational Adaptation Configured solutions for flexibility as the landscape evolves The InfoSum infrastructure is designed to be exceptionally flexible and lightweight. By not locking clients into a fixed product stack designed to deliver a single outcome, we provide our clients with the ultimate in flexible identity configuration so they can adapt and evolve their own solutions to meet the needs of an ever changing digital world.
Steady Adoption Data collaboration will bridge the gap between data “haves” and “have-less” At InfoSum we believe in enabling every company, regardless of size or infrastructure to leverage the power of data collaboration. Data rich companies are able to work seamlessly with businesses which may lack scale in authenticated data. As an example, InfoSum is empowering leading broadcasters, retailers and CPGs to work together on accurate closed-loop measurement solutions.

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A final thought on data collaboration

One of our core values at InfoSum is ‘empowering collective genius’ by which we mean that the sum of data is greater than its individual parts and the world can be made better through the enablement of frictionless collaboration. By ensuring companies always retain full control of their data via InfoSum’s decentralised infrastructure, which is flexible and lightweight to implement, we are enabling infinite collaborative opportunities for companies.

Whether you’re already collaborating on first party data or looking to increase your collaborative opportunity in 2021, we would invite you to reach out  to learn more about how you can collaborate with like-minded companies and deliver a better experience to your customers, all without having to sacrifice control of your data. 

Download a copy of the Winterberry Group report here. 

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