InfoSum’s Beacons redefines non-movement data collaboration

InfoSum believes the new Beacons feature on its data collaboration platform will encourage even more brands and media owners to match first-party data in a bid to improve audience targeting and optimise campaigns.

Beacons is further evidence of the decentralised philosophy that InfoSum champions, with the company adamant that a privacy-centric future requires data collaboration that keeps data in-situ and under the control of the companies who own it.

InfoSum contrasts this with data collaboration solutions that move data to a centralised, third-party location.

Prior to the launch of Beacons, companies had to upload their data to a secure Bunker hosted on the AWS cloud, accessible only to them (but inside the InfoSum credential (cloud instance).

This model is acceptable to most brands and media owners but not all. Organisations in highly regulated industries such as finance or healthcare have stricter requirements and need their data to remain within their own cloud instances.

InfoSum views this as a major advance in data collaboration.

Nick Henthorn, SVP, UK & EMEA at InfoSum (pictured), emphasised: “We work with hundreds of organisations using the existing model, but there have always been others with a staunch position: that no data can leave their credential.”

Beacons will have a huge market impact, he predicts.

“Major organisations will be able to collaborate more freely. The reaction to Beacons [announced last November] has been incredibly positive.

“It has allowed us to accelerate our engagement with a host of companies ranging from walled gardens to global media owners and certain regulated businesses.”

Multiple cloud providers

Beacons has been designed to work with multiple cloud providers and allows interoperability between them. So, if Brand X uses Google Cloud and Media Owner Y uses AWS, Beacons will run in each of their cloud instances.

Microsoft Azure will be added to the list within weeks and there are plans to work with other cloud providers.

At launch, Doruk Aytulu, director, ISV GTM and marketplace at Google Cloud, called Beacons a leap forward in secure cross-cloud data collaboration.

Beacons uses an orchestration layer that facilitates the connection between the different cloud instances. No personal data leaves a Beacon (which is also true of InfoSum’s Bunker technology), with the data instead run through a mathematical model that enables deterministic data matching.

“We have never mashed data together, never brought data into a single identity file, so there is no co-mingling here, Henthorn emphasises. “Now there is no legal transfer of data.”

“This is an evolution in adtech,” he adds. “It means we can further decentralise data collaboration and achieve the benefits of centralising data without doing so.

“A decentralised model does not require brands or media owners to give up control of their data and let a third-party manage it.

“With a centralised solution, if you stop working with the third-party [data collaboration enabler] you must trust them to unpick your data from their centralised platform,” he claims.

“With our decentralised approach – which precedes Beacons – someone can delete InfoSum from their [cloud] instance and they would no longer have any relationship with us.

“From a legal standpoint, the brand or media owner is not allowing someone else to act as their data processor.”

InfoSum believes the decentralised data collaboration model is superior to centralised approaches and Henthorn claims the growing focus on privacy favours the former.

“We expect the marketing industry to shift towards our approach,” he declares.

Talking about data collaboration generally, Henthorn believes identity remains the foundational layer for advanced advertising, providing insights on what people buy, why they buy and what media they consume. Those signals can then be turned into actions that lead to business outcomes.

“We are better able to discover audiences, plan, activate and measure campaigns,” he explains, adding that the proliferation of data signals boosts our ability to understand what is working and why.

Enabler for AI insights

InfoSum views Beacons as a key enabler of AI-driven insights for media planning. “Beacons will help data to be surfaced and analysed,” Henthorn declared.

Beacons supports vector-based matching, enabling collaboration and modelling across expanded data formats, including video, audio, images, and free text.

AI analysis could provide deeper insights into content context and semantics, and these insights could be linked to more structured data-driven learning, such as who consumes different categories of goods or services.

Henthorn gives an example of what this could look like: “People who currently have premium accounts at this bank tend to consume media that features high-powered cars.”

Here, the presence of high-powered cars is a contextual understanding derived from video or images, which is then matched to the kind of buying and intent signals we are already familiar with, which might also be a preference for holidays in North America or a taste for podcasts, etc.

Vector matching also helps identify which ad creative drives the best response rates.

Henthorn believes Beacons will improve data availability for both large and small marketing models, in another boost to the AI-driven marketing era. Data owners remain firmly in control of how data is used, he notes.

Disney is the first organisation to publicly reveal its use of Beacons, which will enable cross-cloud data collaboration.