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What the author is referring to is usually branded, so it's difficult for people on the sales side to give details without revealing who it is unless you're in
by geocar 7y ago
What the author is referring to is usually branded, so it's difficult for people on the sales side to give details without revealing who it is unless you're in the weeds (technically), and I'm sure you can appreciate why they might not want to, so here's the gist:
- Companies collect a number of "records" keyed to an email address. How they do this varies from running microsites/forms that collect data directly from people, to scraping linkedIn and resumes.
- Data vendors will share this data with each other by hashing the email address. Almost always with md5, and rarely salted.
This means you can enrich data both anonymously (by relying on the fact the email address is unsalted) or in an identifying way (because one of the parties has the real email address). In both cases, it's just a LEFT JOIN.
- username444 7y agoIt's much worse than that. I've been approached by a company that trades e-commerce transaction data, for personal data tied to IPs. As in, you give me your customer data, and I'll tell you who visited your site based solely on the IP address. We declined, but it's tempting.
- geocar 7y agoNo, that's exactly what I'm talking about: They'll buy the md5-email-to-cookies from one provider (e.g. Lotame, Liveramp, etc) then use that to onboard email+contact data they've purchased from companies that have email address-to-personal data (e.g. MVF, ZoomInfo, etc). IF that was done as purely a lead qualification step, it's a good way to take legitimate content syndication done by a third party into direct marketing, but there's no technical reason they need to be leads or have any level of qualification -- and only a weak market force (poor conversion rate) that prevents it from being more widespread.