It’s Time to Give Marketers Control Over their Data

By Jonathan Gardner On Sep 25, 2018

We all know the saying about teaching someone to fish, and the lesson therein – empowerment and ownership of a process are infinitely more valuable than simply providing a deliverable and calling it a day. So why do so many walled gardens and data management platforms (DMPs) insist on simply selling audiences, rather than empowering customers to create them?

Semasio’s mission is to give marketers control, transparency and ownership of their data and audience strategies. We believe in empowering customers because that’s how you build long-lasting relationships. There’s a long history of tech companies viewing transparency as a threat, with revenue models that disempower marketers or keep them within walled gardens. Rather than following their lead, leaving clients in the dark and dependent, we are breaking down walls, giving brands control and ownership of the audience creation process.

Along with being opaque, walled gardens and other providers have built vast businesses based on keeping clients hungry for tasty audience segments. Unfortunately, when a marketer wants to build a custom audience in walled gardens, the first thing they must do is hand over their CRM database. In this situation, the ‘partner’ is not only keeping you hungry, they’re keeping the best of the catch for themselves.

With many DMPs, you’ll buy an audience for a particular campaign, then go back and buy another one for a future campaign. There’s no ability to tweak the audience you’ve bought, nor is there the option to update it based on how user affinity changes over time.

Our team not only empowers clients, we make marketers smarter. We realize not every brand or agency can hire a small army of data scientists, so we set out to democratize the process of custom audience creation. Our self-service platform empowers anyone to reap the benefits of sophisticated data science — seamlessly creating custom audiences without any background in data science. This gives complete transparency and control over how an audience segment is created, what it contains, and what insights are generated. And as a matter of course: If you built it, you own it – unequivocally.

Our customers maintain full control over how an audience is built, in line with the goals of a campaign. The entire process is transparent: you can see what is happening at every step of the way, balance between affinity and reach for the optimal audience composition, and decide which demand side platform (DSP) is used to take action. Every audience you create is yours in perpetuity – you own it, can use it whenever you’d like, have it updated dynamically, and it will never be sold to a competitor.

Semasio gives marketers complete control, transparency and ownership — because we have nothing to hide.