Commentary
Why This Streaming Platform Could Change How Brands Sell Data
- by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, August 16, 2021
Putting data up for sale online has become increasingly transparent. One streaming platform company in particular built a marketplace that looks similar to a retail store for data. Think Etsy, only for data.
Rather than hosting a variety of branded stores selling merchandise to consumers like custom shelves or party favors, this ecommerce store sells data related to health, mortgages, finance, and consumer purchases.
Steven Schwartz, COO of Narrative, a software platform and data marketplace, likens the company’s newest business to Shopify, making it easy for any data owner to open a branded commerce store to sell permission-based first-party data.
“We’re bringing a consumer-mindset to data with the commerce platform,” he said. “Data needs to become more accessible.”
The company launched Data Shops several weeks ago with several companies such as Fanatics and Sports Apparel. The ecommerce marketplace now hosts about a dozen companies.
Here’s how it works: Companies set up the shell for the store, select colors, create and upload logos, with descriptive text that defines the data they want to sell — steps similar to creating a website or ecommerce store to sell merchandise. The last step is to merchandise the data, Schwartz explains.
“For example, Fanatics has a slew of data related to sports apparel,” he said. “They can merchandise that data in several ways.”
Schwartz said Fanatics could, on the eve of the Major League baseball playoffs, decide to package and merchandise their data based on anyone who ever bought a baseball logo t-shirt. They can slice and dice that data based on the teams and other attributes.
Narrative handles the payments, transactions, and reporting. Rather than a consumer-oriented business, the company focuses this ecommerce marketplace on business-to-business.
Narrative also announced a partnership with geospatial data firm Tamoco making its location data available to users of the Narrative platform. Tamoco supports companies in finance and investment, marketing and advertising, retail and real estate, academia, research, and planning and strategy.
Laurie Sullivan is a writer and editor for MediaPost. You can reach Laurie at lauriesullivan@gmail.com.
Pardon me, but I am completely confused by the analogy of ETSY. Here's why:
I believe that the concept of someone giving their "informed consent" for Company A to share their data with Company B is predicated on them knowing who company B is. This means that a scalable global trading platform for first party data cannot be anything like ETSY.
What ETSY enables is three parties to trade. The buyer, the seller and ETSY.
What a data trade will require is 4 parties to trade. The buyer, the seller, ETSY, and the consenting individual.
These analogies people provide are so often flawed. Let's use the example of a pencil geek (like me) trying to sell ten vintage Conte Criterium 550 pencils on ETSY.
On ETSY, I don't need anyone from Conte to approve or consent to the transaction. It is between me and the buyer, and ETSY enables this trade.
But with first party data, I would be selling personal information about Steven Schwartz or Laurie Sullivan. And, they would need to consent.
So, there will be me, the buyer, the platform formerly likened to ETSY, and Steven/Laurie would need to be involved. That means Steven and Laurie need to consent to their data being shared between the first party and processed onto ETSY, etc....
Am i going down a rabbit hole, or does this not seem "nothing like ETSY" now, because it has a "person as the product", and person has rights and they can refuse at any time to be party to this, or just refuse to be sold to Company X on a Friday.
If it is like ETSY, it's an ETSY that doesn't allow me to sell pencils without first having approval from the pencil company, and then it would require the pencil company to ratify and approve/decline every transaction.
I'd be fascinated to understand this more, because I am confident my company could assist --- if it is legal of course.