#87: Quo Vadis Green Shoot AdTech Interviews
With Luke McGuinness, President and Co-founder of Above Data
Welcome back to Quo Vadis Green Shoot AdTech Interviews.
In this series, we step into the shoes of “AdTech Equalizers” — the green shoot companies changing how the advertising job gets done. We delve into their worldview and unveil new strategies, tools, and thinking that make advertisers (and investors) better off.
Today we have the great pleasure of speaking with Luke McGuinness, the President of Above Data, the leader of semantic data that helps companies working with large amounts of consumer data to increase data quality and usability.
Q1: What does Above Data do?
A: Luke
We are a technology company that makes consumer data usable for business applications. Amid the growing complexity and volume of consumer data, data needs to be more accessible and dynamic. We bridge the gap between raw data & business value.
We partner with brands, retailers, data companies, publishers, and platforms to remove the friction that exists in deriving value from their data. Our clients range from marketing-focused companies to quant-oriented financial institutions, showcasing the versatility of our solutions across various industries and really highlighting the prevalence of friction when it comes to getting value from data.
Q2: Can you explain the problems Above Data focuses on?
A: Luke
We talk about it generally as data friction.
Most companies today either spend significant resources making data usable, they just make do with messy data, or sometimes both. Whether companies have robust 1st party data or are relying on 2nd and 3rd party data, the process of cleansing, normalizing, and enriching the data is a significant undertaking. For a business or marketing user, getting raw data to be suitable and usable for their purposes is not something they have a lot of direct control over.
When companies do not have dynamic, clean, and fast data, this impacts all downstream business applications including insights, planning, activation & measurement.
And that’s the problem space. Companies have access to more data than ever, but access is just one problem. Making the data usable is an entirely separate issue. That’s where we come in.
Q3: What are Above Data’s solutions and how do they apply to consumer data and marketing applications?
A: Luke
At a high level, we are building a semantic layer for consumer data.
A semantic layer is the space between raw data and the business applications for that data. Our solutions are for marketing professionals, data analysts, and business decision-makers who struggle with fragmented data sources, inconsistent data quality, and inefficient data management processes. For them, we provide a solution that ensures high-quality data, operational efficiency, and consistency to power business decisions.
This is especially crucial in marketing and adtech, where AI-based media buying, retail media, and data collaboration are increasingly important, and having dynamic data is a huge differentiator. Our semantic layer translates complex raw data into understandable, dynamic, and actionable information. For instance, there is a lot of attention given to cookie deprecation and its impact on reach, but not nearly enough to the data attributes used to describe that reach.
Some specific examples of our semantic layer in action include 1) sensitive data detection 2) the classification of raw behavioral data to identify the applicable interests, products, brands manufacturers 3) the translation of data from one taxonomy into dozens of other companies’ transactions, and 4) the creation of meta-data to power innovative use cases.
It’s worth highlighting that the market problems we’re solving, and the friction we’re removing from the market, were not really possible even a few years ago. It is only through extensive training data & fine-tuning LLMs to these specific problems that these solutions are possible.
A significant amount of focus on AI for marketing uses, to date, has been around the consumer experience - creative, content, personalization, and such. Above Data is farther down the tech stack, focusing on making the data that powers all of those capabilities as robust and accurate as possible. When we improve that data quality, all of the applications built on top of that data perform better. We are the category owner in that space.
Q4: How does what you’re doing benefit customers?
A: Luke
Business users need their data to be dynamic, fast, clean, and accurate.
In short, what we’re doing results in a faster path to value from data for the business. With more dynamic and usable data, companies unlock product innovation, and revenue growth, and can realize significant operational efficiency.
A recent report issued by the Winterberry Group highlighted data quality and complexity of data integration as two of the top three challenges that companies experience when utilizing data for marketing in the next several years. That’s what we’re addressing.
For example, one of our clients ingests millions of consumer transaction data records from several sources. By working with us, they were able to cut nine months off of the time it would have taken them to catch up with the data by doing it using their legacy processes. Another customer, a data platform, has dramatically cut down operational expenses and reduced regulatory risk by utilizing our solutions to identify sensitive data. Another client, Alliant Data, actually just issued a press release about our tech’s impact on their data quality.
Q5: Why is Above Data best placed to solve these data friction problems?
A: Luke
Our advantage lies in our specialized focus, experience, and technology. We are solely dedicated to solving data usability problems at scale. In-house teams have many competing priorities and we know from experience how hard it can be to get consistent and performant results from LLMs, especially at scale and in production environments.
Our AI engineers come from finance where speed & accuracy are paramount. We’ve taken those learnings coupled with our domain expertise in data-driven marketing to create exceptional solutions for our customers.
As the volume and complexity of data grow, and as the stakes rise for companies to have dynamic and usable data, data hygiene must be done with best-in-class solutions. That’s Application Wave. That’s Above Data.
Get In Touch With Above Data: If you’d like to learn more about semantic data to bring more of your data to life, reach out to Luke at luke@abovedata.io.
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