Patrick Glantz, Gravito: “consumers are expecting a meaningful and proactive dialogue with brands”

According to our guest today, ensuring data privacy often proves to be extremely difficult since companies tend to gather data with many different technologies and the so-called 360-degree view of the consumer sits in a data lake.

It will be increasingly difficult for marketers to "know" about or target online consumers if third-party, cross-website cookie tracking is phased out, especially in a world where data has become a currency and VPNs are getting more and more popular. For all businesses, first-party data will become critical.

For this reason, we reached out to Patrick Glantz, the COO at Gravito – zero to third-party data management service. We discussed data and consent management solutions, the pressing issues marketers face today, and more. Let’s take a look.

What has your journey been like? How did the idea of Gravito originate?

We are a bunch of former Nokia and Microsoft colleagues from Finland with a background in analytics, CRM, and big data. Moving away from corporate life to a start-up has been extremely hectic but at the same time very rewarding. After working with so many different martech solutions we saw a great need for a product that would knit together the different consumer and technology identities along with the consents and preferences. We’ve been influenced by the Nordic MyData thinking as well as the technology change around third-party cookie erosion.

Can you introduce us to your data and consent management solutions? What are their key features?

In Gravito, identity resolution and consent management join edge profiling analytics and orchestration. We provide a toolkit that gathers all data in a first-party context and solves the problem of third-party cookie erosion. It has the following features:

• An intelligent cookie consent banner.

• With in-built identity resolution (match-on ID capability) joining the probabilistic and deterministic identities.

• An in-session edge profile with persistent storage towards adtech.

What would you consider some of the most pressing issues that marketers face nowadays?

Consumers are expecting a meaningful and proactive dialogue with their brands. Many of the companies aren’t however accurate and real-time with their communication. They’ve built their stack around solutions that they haven’t managed to knit properly together resulting in overly complex and expensive set-ups. The customer data is often sitting in the basement and isn’t actionable at different touchpoints. This all prevents brands from running a meaningful conversation with the customer.

How did the recent global events affect your field of work? Were there any new challenges you had to adapt to?

We’ve been working online for many years so we were used to it. Covid and the lockdown weren't causing any issues for us. In one way, the martech sales process has probably been streamlined a bit and there is most likely a better opportunity to compete against the bigger players than before.

What are some of the worst mistakes companies tend to make when it comes to handling large amounts of personal customer data?

Companies tend to gather data with many different technologies and have a siloed architecture where the so-called 360-degree view of the consumer sits in a data lake in the basement. With this approach, there’s no way to run a trigger-based real-time dialogue with the consumer. As PII data sits in many different places, GDPR requirements, in terms of data portability and the right to be forgotten, become difficult to fulfill. The importance of zero-party data and data transparency will grow at the same time with ever-increasing privacy regulations.

Besides consent management solutions, what other marketing tools do you believe can greatly enhance one’s operations?

Brands relying heavily on third-party data, cookies, and other sources, will certainly need to start focusing on their first-party data. Taking advantage of your brand’s consumer data before turning to rented data (Google, FB Ads, etc) can in many cases be much more efficient.

What data privacy issues would you like to see solved in the next few years?

I would hope that the EU would solve the current issues around data usage and privacy, and wouldn’t be so inconsistent in terms of the legislation. There’s a fear that poor legislation won’t serve the citizens or the advertisers but rather take the Internet back to where it was 15 years ago.

Tell us, what’s next for Gravito?

We’re currently piloting data exchange between brands (in this case publishers). This opens interesting and exciting opportunities going forward. We will grow outside of the Nordics to bigger markets and show how data should be managed going forward.