Commentary

Behind Neustar Second-Party Marketplace That Taps iSpot, Scanbuy, Foursquare Data

The marketing solutions arm of Neustar recently partnered with iSpot, Scanbuy, and Foursquare to launch a second-party data marketplace powered by Fabrick, a unified identity-based ecosystem connecting brand, publishers, and platforms.

The marketplace gives partners more transparency and control of data, allowing them to build cost-efficient, custom audiences with second-party data compared with third-party data. It’s a way to provide brands with household and customer data, based on a licensing fee. Essentially, first-party data from iSpot, Scanbuy, and Foursquare is collected from consenting consumers. By the time it gets to Neustar, it becomes the company’s second-party data.

 “We’re not providing any PI or PII data to any marketers, but we take the characteristics, behavior and attributes of that data in its raw form and allow a major retailer or a CPG company to take external data from our partners and link it to an identity graph,” said Devon DeBlasio, product marketing director at Neustar.

Neustar also offers its own second-party data — contextual, psychographic, and demographic — in the marketplace.

DeBlasio likened the second-market concept to a one-to-many data cleanroom. The company has also built data cleanrooms for individual advertising and marketing clients. Any information they should not have access to is stripped out.

“We’re also dipping our toe into creating more secure and one-to-two or one-to-a-few cleanrooms that connect publishers and advertisers or advertisers and advertisers,” he said. “These are things we will be launching in 2021.”

Without mobile advertising IDs and cookies, marketers must find new ways to access data that helps them understand and connect with customers.

Second-party data marketplaces that use privacy as the backbone have begun to emerge, allowing brands to access login data, device information, geolocation data, interest-level information, and transaction data to support their own data and identity graphs.

When asked how much data Neustar has available daily, DeBlasio said, “It pretty much covers the U.S. population for adults. … It covers hundreds of millions of users.”

Today, most of the data is U.S.-based, but by second-quarter 2021, it expects to have multiple providers within the same category in the U.S. The company is also expanding internationally, he says. 

Next story loading loading..
About the Author

Laurie Sullivan is a writer and editor for MediaPost. You can reach Laurie at lauriesullivan@gmail.com.