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Qonsent is merging with a blockchain provider to launch a full-stack privacy tech startup
The co-founders of a new privacy tech startup called Precise.ai are two names you probably recognize: Adam Helfgott and Jesse Redniss.
On Wednesday, the duo announced the formation of Precise.ai, which merges Qonsent with blockchain-based data infrastructure technology developed by Valence Labs, an R&D hub for cryptography technology founded by Helfgott in 2021.
Helfgott is a founder and former CEO of television advertising platform Madhive, while Redniss was a data strategy executive at WarnerMedia and Turner before launching Qassent in 2021, a provider of user consent and privacy management solutions.
Redniss will serve as CEO of Precise and Helfgott will serve as a strategic advisor on technology and engineering.
Do the thing end-to-end
The general idea, Redniss told AdExchanger, is to combine privacy-compliant consent management with federated machine learning (deep breathing), custom audience creation using first-party data and contextual signals, identity, the ability to track what data is used where, measurement and activation across channels.
That’s a long list of some of ad tech’s favorite buzzwords, but it boils down to this: get permission to collect data, track where it comes from, and allow multiple parties to share, learn from, and use it without having to move it everywhere. , not unlike a clean room.
If it seems like Precise is trying to drink a lot of other people’s milkshakes, well, you’re right.
While the plan isn’t to disintermediate data cleanrooms, customer data platforms and consent management platforms, the fact is that “a lot of things in the market are becoming commoditized,” Redniss said.
“Many of these functions are being rolled into larger cloud operations, including Amazon, Snowflake and Databricks,” he said. “We’re trying to resolve a lot of these components in an end-to-end infrastructure, which is also the direction the industry in general is moving in.”
The case of data decentralization
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So how exactly does Precise work in practice?
Qonsent offers consumer-facing tools that people can use to manage their permissions on a brand-by-brand basis.
Valence, meanwhile, has built a data infrastructure on the blockchain that can verify data ownership and provenance, use cryptography to track how data is used, and attribute data value to specific sources.
Instead of a brand storing its data in a centralized database and working with multiple different partners to analyze and activate it, Precise would allow brands to integrate their data and make it accessible via “contributing nodes” within a network.
Through these connection points, brands could mix multiple data sets without moving or compromising them, and query the data across the network to gain insights.
For example, if a fashion brand observes that some customers are suddenly spending $200 more per week on clothing, other brands might use that information to infer that these customers may have moved into a new economic bracket and may be in the market for high prices . items, such as a new car or high-end sneakers.
Modeling real-world spending patterns derived from consensus first-party data can provide a truer signal of intent than can be ascertained from, say, someone reading an article about buying a car, Helfgott said.
Creating a decentralized marketplace for exchanging data makes sense, he said, because it provides transparency to all parties involved in a transaction without exposing PII.
But don’t call it “the blockchain.” That term has become reductive and almost meaningless, Helfgott said, because too many companies have bought into the hype and used “blockchain for its own sake, which has created a lot of noise.”
“When Google Cloud launches a new product in its suite,” Helfgott said, “we’re not all out there saying, ‘You’re a BigQuery company’; people use the product simply because it’s the best tool for the job from a engineering point of view. And blockchain is just that: an engineering utility.”
For starters, Precise will attempt to fit as seamlessly as possible into your existing ad buying process.
It will use proprietary data to generate readily available identifiers, including Ramp ID and UID2, and will also integrate with a broad spectrum of SSPs, DSPs and ad servers.
“We’re being careful right now to support interoperability for the current way things are done,” Redniss said. “We don’t want to disrupt workflows on the execution side.”
But Precise is developing its own “higher permission ID token structure,” it said, using consensus mechanisms developed for Qonsent’s historic business. And it also has its own DSP for activation.
Precise will introduce these additional elements once more customers are up and running with the new data infrastructure. (Redniss said Precise is signing a deal with a large sports publisher, but declined to name it.)
As for current Qonsent customers, nothing changes for the time being. They can continue to use the same tools to collect first-party data they agreed to and perform ID validation as usual, even if Precise tries to sell them the new features.
Redniss and Helfgott are still deciding whether they will keep or retire the Qonsent brand in the future.