InfoSum makes agencies key facilitators of data collaboration

Many traditional solutions continue to act as a data intermediary, offering a managed service. InfoSum equips agencies with hands-on capabilities without any data being shared, which crucially relieves them of the burden of data processing responsibilities.

Empower media agencies with ‘hands-on’ capabilities

InfoSum’s decentralized data ecosystem and rich permission controls empower media agencies to act on behalf of brands inside a secure clean room environment. 

Agencies never take on ownership, control, or liability for accessing clients' raw data

Working in tandem, brands receive end-to-end protection and transparency, while the agency is able to execute smarter data-driven strategies without ever touching sensitive customer data.

Exciting new partnerships and opportunities

Brands can access exclusive media agency ecosystems of data and media partners to unlock repeatable strategic insights and supercharge their end-to-end marketing strategies. 

Table of contents

Strategic data collaboration best practices

Understand their strategy and data

Explore the use cases

Understand their team and tech resources

Tactical data collaboration with InfoSum

Getting started training

Onboarding data

Legal and compliance process

Collaboration settings for Agencies

Strategic data collaboration best practices

We recommend running a readiness assessment before starting the collaboration project - you can use the below questions to ensure that each brand is prepared for success.

Understand their strategy and data

• What is the brand's current or planned data strategy?
  • Long-term ambition
  • Short-term goals
  • Campaign KPIs
• The volume of consented first-party data: Ideally circa 500K+ records in the UK
  • It’s your responsibility to ensure that you have the appropriate consent to use the data for matching purposes
• Identifiers: What identifiers are there available? Do they have emails? Postcode?
• Attributes they might want to use for segmentation: current/lapsed customer, at risk, products, etc

Explore the use cases 

• What are they looking to achieve through a data clean room?
• Are they interested in insights/media planning & activation?
• What are their measurement/attribution expectations? 
• Do they have any preferred partners they’d like to collaborate with through a data clean room?

Understand their team and tech resources

• Do they have data, legal, compliance, and commercial resources they can put against a first-party data strategy?
• What adjacent platforms do they use today (DSPs, identity platforms, measurement solutions, CDPs or DMPs, clean room solutions)?

Across the brand and their collaboration partners the following teams are involved:

• Legal & Compliance: Sign off on the agreement and use case with the partner, and (if new to InfoSum) the platform terms
• Commercial: Sign off on the commercials with the partner and work on defining the strategy for the use cases
• Operational: Ensuring the smooth running of data operations in the clean room
  • Data team: to prepare and publish the data to the Bunker
  • Clean room ops: might be a different team, like the agency. Usually, only one party manages the operations in the clean room in the collaboration.

Tactical data collaboration with InfoSum

Getting started training

We recommend reading our getting started section to familiarize yourself with the platform and platform tasks. It’s also a great resource for brand clients as they get onboarded. 

Onboarding data

Here’s an overview of data ingest into the platform. The brand will have to procure an ingest method - which may be a cloud storage connector (S3, GCS, or sFTP) or simply uploading a local file. 

When using a server import, often marketing teams do not have the technical expertise or even sometimes access to the server details and they have to work with other teams such as the data team or IT team. We recommend sharing the relevant how-to article for the server import with the marketing and IT team so they can coordinate effectively.

Legal and compliance process

Brands need to enter into a commercial agreement with each collaboration partner.

Here are the main documents that the brand’s legal team will need to review:

• InfoSum platform terms: Any company uploading data to the InfoSum platform must sign the InfoSum T&Cs. If the agency is uploading data on behalf of the client they can sign the T&Cs themselves. This only needs to be done once.
• DSA with partners: Most parties who are collaborating on InfoSum decide to enter Data Sharing Agreements between themselves if the use case includes activation. InfoSum can provide a template for this. Most publishers and data providers have set workflows with templated documents that can streamline this process. Making this process smoother can be a huge added value for agencies and help brands get to collaboration quicker
• Agency and brand contract: Each brand and agency relationship is different and there might be additional documents to complete.

Collaboration settings for Agencies

In InfoSum, the data owner (in this case the brand)  is in charge of data onboarding – that means that the brand’s data team will onboard the data into their Bunker and then add the assets to the relevant Collaboration for each use case so their agency ops team to manage the clean room on their behalf. 

Each Collaboration includes pre-defined partners working together for one or multiple use cases. To enable the use cases on the brand's behalf, the agency will need to be a Collaboration 'Operator'.

Adding a Bunker or Destination to a Collaboration allows partners to query the dataset but never to access it.

We recommend asking the brand to configure their Insight dataset like below to allow querying and activating the data to pre-determined locations (partner or owned platforms) - but the specific permissions might change based on the use case.

If the brand is exporting their own data they will also need an Activation Bunker. They can set up the permissions to allow export to their own Destinations only or also to which partner Destinations (e.g. if the target location is owned by the agency, they can allow export to Agency owned Destinations)