Under the Hood: BrightTag Brings the Privacy Revolt to Advertisers

When the website data analytics industry was in its infancy, companies like Quantcast traded data management capabilities with website owners for consumer data via tagging. Now companies are beginning to question traditional arrangements which provide third-party companies with access to valuable data in exchange for analytical tools or capabilities that might be available elsewhere. BrightTag hopes to appeal to these website owners by offering a single dashboard through which companies can broker their data and interact with ad exchanges, trading desks, ad verification networks, and digital agencies without connecting with third party tagging or container tag systems.

So-called bucket tag systems, which can place as many as several thousand tags on a website, can make data easier to access, but they can’t help website owners monetize their data, add quality controls, or prevent the problems data leakage can create for their sites according to Marc Kiven, founder and CRO of BrightTag.

BrightTag’s model may be indicative of a future in which website owners independently maintain granular control over tagging, data transfers and coremetrics data gathering, hoping to monetize not only their content and consumer pool, but their vendor relationships as well.