With digital audience identifiers waning in usefulness, many ad buyers are once again looking back toward “quality” media opportunities.

But that quest for “quality” doesn’t just mean media – it also means middlemen.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Frans Vermeulen, VP Strategy & Market Development, TransUnion, explains why the supply chain must also clean up.

Quality in the machine

“You need quality on both fronts – the quality of the identity graph and those linkages, and the quality of the constitution of any given audience,” Vermeulen says.

“We just get the sense that this flight to quality is becoming more important across the whole supply chain…

“Not just for agencies, for marketers, for publishers, (but for) all kinds of technology platforms as well that sit in the middle and make the activation actually happen.”

Data sharing

Vermeulen’s TransUnion is the consumer information provider sitting on a heritage of providing credit reports, and has latterly been extending into providing audience data for media targeting.

This summer, TransUnion announced a collaboration to provide that data to media agency Canvas Worldwide.

The company is also playing in the new realm of allowing companies to share and overlay their datasets in a privacy-compliant manner.

Neustar, the ad-tech company TransUnion acquired, this summer launched Marketing and Analytics Clean Room.

Cleaning up

An emerging category, “clean room” software allows data owners to match up profiles with those in other organizations’ data sets in a way that does not breach privacy regulation.

“We haven’t seen a ton of actual transaction volume flowing through these kinds of systems,” Vermeulen says.

“But there’s no doubt that the future of data collaboration and these kind of more privacy-safe clean rooms/cloud-based environments is certainly the trend of the future.

“We’re participating in that directly with our own solutions and partnering… you will see announcements in the future, maybe the near future, on some very unique partnerships in this space.”