The trillion-dollar market for digital advertisements now endures more turmoil than at any point in history. Old business models that treat people as products, depend on ubiquitous access to data at no cost, and assume that big, unstructured, data trumps authenticated and permissioned data now produce increasingly poor results for brands.
Additionally, global regulations like the GDPR now force all of the players in the industry to either rethink how they gather, store, and process personal information or face extreme, and in some cases, existential liabilities (see yesterday’s action against Acxiom and Oracle). These new rules will force fundamental changes to how data brokers approach online advertising.
The flux creates an inflection point in the market in which investors now pull investments from the stale approaches of the past and focus investment on new approaches that meet regulatory standards and reengage with the people who actually produce the data (see Forrester’s market assessment). To that end, Terry Kawaja, founder of LUMA Partners, predicts that investments will be increasingly focused on solutions that “digitize formerly analog media channels.”
Vision
DataLucent builds and enables a “people first” data platform. Currently, when building audiences and panels for brands, the industry begins with the data and assumes that, by gathering enough of it, they will be able to discern real people from this vast statistical wilderness. Brands distrust this approach and major advertisers like Proctor & Gamble have pulled billions of dollars in ad-spend.
In contrast, DataLucent begins with individuals who opt-in to its platform when they express a genuine interest in a brand. This simple shift unleashes a cascade of benefits for both the individual who shares their data and the advertisers who market to them. The new environment yields authentic, regulatory sound, and deeply insightful data flows that other companies cannot deliver.
