In our latest Thought Leaders Circle video, Qonsent CEO and Founder Jesse Redniss, an OG TVREVver, discusses the issues around data and privacy and why he founded Qonsent to try and solve those issues in a way that benefits publishers, advertisers and consumers alike.

JESSE REDNISS: So the product is actually a suite of services. We call it a composable identity management and engagement system. We have user experience products that any brand or publisher can deploy across their omnichannel touchpoints with consumers. If you're engaging with the consumer and at any point you're asking for their information—first name, email, last name, home address, whatever it may be—there is a frictionless way to ask for that and make it part of the consumer experience. We specialize in building that UX out and integrating it directly into any brand or publisher's consumer touchpoint.

We also enable, as part of that, ID validation. We ask, 'Is this person real? Is it a bot? Is it fraud? Are they of legal drinking age? Are they a child?' and things like that. So, we can actually run real-time ID validation through a lot of partnerships that we've enabled. This ensures that you can not only cleanse the data upfront but also ensure that the data you're getting and the person you're engaging with, who's about to give permissions on how that data is used, is in fact a real person.

We also have the ability to bring all that information into what we call our consented graph. As a service provider, we support all of our different clients and spin up essentially micrographs of permissioned and consented data that they can then use for all the different use cases, business strategy use cases they may have, and send it and orchestrate it to their CDP, their CMP, just Snowflake for us. We're totally agnostic. We're really focusing our suite of products on enabling that to reduce the friction that a lot of publishers and brands have had in trying to figure out how to just get better consented first-party data from my consumer.

Typically, you just will have a privacy policy. It's like, 'Oh, the person checked the box; they read through the privacy policy.' 99% of people don't read a privacy policy, right? So now, as legislation looms and a lot of different aspects of sensitive data require actually informed consent, we say, 'Hey, you need to let the consumer know at the point of data collection how that data is going to be used, who it is going to be shared with.' No company is really doing a great job of doing that. Some brands are doing it, like Nike, I think, does a phenomenal job of doing it, and then you get loyal brand fans out of that.

So, we actually help brands and publishers enable that as part of their consumer journey. There are a lot of user experience and behavioral science aspects tied into their data collection strategies. And then from there, we all know how it goes. Ad teams want to use the data, marketing teams want to use the data, product teams want to use the data. That data also wants to get used by agencies, and then typically gets farmed out as part of an affiliate system.

So the consumer now has the choice and the ability to say yes or no in a lot of use cases. And so, we help brands identify those cases and build better user experiences.