• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer, 11 hours ago

Anonym partnered with its fourth major publisher in less than one year as Mozilla's privacy-first ad measurement company finds a niche to become a major player in the metrics space. Mozilla acquired Anonym in 2024.

Reddit joined Snap, TikTok and Pinterest—the list of companies making the shift as more advertisers want to measure incremental lift but cannot share their first-party data to the platform. More partners to come. It will give advertisers a choice to measure performance across multiple platforms. 

For brands operating in restrictive data environments, because of competitive, contractual or policy constraints, encryption now provides a confidential computation layer for advertising measurement.

This layer sits between brands and platforms like Reddit to help advertisers establish learning plans, assess performance, and optimize campaigns while adhering to specific data privacy policies.

Graham Mudd, SVP of product at Mozilla, told MediaPost the company now provides Reddit with incrementality measurement based on privacy methods.

“Impression data from platforms like Reddit get combined with conversion data from advertisers,” Mudd said. “Both data sets are encrypted before being shared with Anonym. Analytics and anonymity of the data get processed, before sending back to the advertiser measurement results.”

Before founding Anonym, Mudd worked with data for years at Comscore and Facebook.

At Anonym, he said, when advertisers, publishers or platforms share data with Anonym, the data moves into a confidential type of computing environment that allows companies to share the data without Anonym gaining access to it.

Data processes are set up in advance, rather in real time, so when the data enters an encrypted computing environment, humans do not have access to it. Or have the ability to look at it. By the time the data reaches this point, instructions have been set. Only anonymous data insights are shared and then deleted.

Inside this environment the data is then decrypted and matched with impressions whether or not people, consumers, were exposed or not exposed to the campaign.

“It gives advertisers what they need to better understand campaign outcomes,” Mudd said, adding it's all about preserving privacy.

There also is a plan to build new methods for optimization and ad targeting, building audiences for TV, he said. Anonym has used AI to code faster, but the company has just begun to explore different ways to use the technology for measurement outputs. 

He said as AI platforms begin to focus on advertising in their businesses, privacy-preserving models will be built into platforms.