• by Charlene Weisler , Op-Ed Contributor, November 2, 2016

Is there life after private equity? Ask Adam Paulisick, chief product officer of Commerce Signals, who left the financial world to enter the advertising data industry. “I never intended to be a data person,” he admitted. But now he has established himself in a data-rich, media-oriented world.

After the company he was working for was acquired by Nielsen, Paulisick spent several years working for the measurement company, first in London and eventually for Nielsen Catalina Solutions. His current firm, Commerce Signals, works with companies that want to monetize their data for advertising and marketing purposes. So if a company is sitting on a large amount of data but is not expert in positioning and adapting the data for media purposes, Commerce Signals can be the go-between for the data and its media applications.

Charlene Weisler: How do you join the data owners with media companies?

Adam Paulisick: Right now, our supply sources are large financial institutions, like Visa.  On the other side are advertisers and publishers, for example PetSmart or Pandora.  We allow the data owners to respond to queries posed by advertisers, such as, "Did my campaign drive sales?" or "Which tactic is driving the highest sales for the lowest cost?." The data owners remain 100% in control and  get to deliver insights — or not — based on each query.

Weisler: What type of data do you collect and how do you use it?

Paulisick: We actually don’t collect any data. We… ask [data owners] how they want to permission the data and how it is to be used by advertisers (merchants).  We work in very tight collaboration with the data-owning company, taking unstructured but very valuable data and fit it to the type of templates that advertisers are asking for….

Weisler: We use ratings as a currency in TV, but now we seem to be looking at measurements for ROI. What do you see as the future of TV measurement?

Paulisick: I believe we will reach a compromise. It is as much about building intent as it is understanding how people are transacting and purchasing.

My view on measurement companies like Nielsen is that they are going to meet in the middle. They have a very strong and deep legacy of understanding the amount of time and types of folks who are watching and consuming content no matter how that hardware definition changes. Nielsen has also invested in things like Nielsen Catalina Solutions, areas like consumer package goods to monitor purchase behaviors and also to present a different view of media like buyer graphics that show how someone shops, as opposed to the demographic attributes that we historically use.

Weisler: Are you working in the programmatic area?

Paulisick: Yes, very much. The demand is that people want machines interacting with machines so that they are “always on.” But it is important to remember that data sets often lag the ability to act with the speed of a lot of programmatic exchanges in technology today. What we are focusing on is bringing data sets that can respond within 72 hours of when someone made a purchase or interacted in some way offline or online, and then bring that directly to those programmatic exchanges.

Weisler: Where do you see the future of data will be five years from now?

Paulisick: We'll see a twofold shift. One, we see the shift from the power and the value of the data going from the buyer to the seller. I believe that there is a second-party data market on the rise. That means that first-party data, meaning the direct collectors of the actual source, being willing to sell those insights directly to another party.

Second, this trend will form a cooperative mentality so that people who do not overlap (such as with geographic footprints) will be more interested in coming together and sharing data insight without having to commingle the data.