Why One Fortune 100Grocery Retailer Selected MetaRouter to Bridge the GapBetween Security and Growth

This grocery retailer needed a solution that gave them the security and oversight they required paired with the ability to use the highest quality data in marketing channels.

In 2019, a Fortune 100 grocery retailer saw the tides of data security and governance changing. They recognized the need to be more rigorous in their policies, including those that ultimately impacted the data that was shared with marketing channels like Facebook, Google and others.

They recognized that the risk for failing to protect sensitive data is high – so high that they considered discontinuing the use of these platforms altogether. Their data security and marketing teams paired up to find a solution that both of them could agree with. They knew they needed to continue to grow through marketing channels, but they also needed to reduce their risk with increased security and data governance.

The Problem

This retailer conducted a months long search to assess all of the available options for managing customer data. When their teams realized that none of these options offered the flexibility, compliance, control and data quality solutions that they required, the IT team even considered building their solution from the ground up. They quickly realized that a homegrown solution would cost $7-$10M and more than three years to build, leaving them with a hefty bill and open to continued risk during that time.When MetaRouter connected with the team, they had an extensive list of requirements and a clear idea of how they wanted to proceed to protect themselves, maintain trust with their customers and continue to empower their marketing team to reach organizational growth goals. They needed a partner who could not only make their vision a reality, but who could also consult with them on the ever-changing privacy, marketing technology and data use landscape.

The IT team knew their requirement presented challenges for the other solutions they had already assessed. For a customer data network to meet its internal needs, these items were crucial:

• Private cloud hosting to support IT’s strict requirements
• Fully server-to-server (S2S) pipelines for increased governance
• Custom data model support to easily integrate with existing infrastructure
• Strict security and privacy requirements to improve existing standards
• Identity support and resolution for anonymous users
• Attribute enrichment for better personalization

After reviewing all proposals, MetaRouter was the only option that could offer them the comprehensive solution they required.

The MetaRouter Solution

MetaRouter implemented a solution that gave both the data security and marketing teams what they needed – an impossible task for the other platforms this retailer assessed. While other options focus on either compliance, control or quality, MetaRouter provides all three for a truly full-service solution that creates data trust within the organization and with customers. This retailer is now empowered to both mitigate risk and continue to grow with digital marketing channels.

Data trust is crucial in our age of misuse, leaks, breaches and legislation. Every organization is faced with the challenge of needing to collect and use customer data, while also needing to mitigate the risk that comes with personal and sometimes sensitive data.

MetaRouter puts establishing and scaling data trust at theheart of everything you do. Our solution includes everything you need to control your customer data, maintain compliance and ensure data quality.

Our flexible solution can adapt to even the most rigorous requirements. We worked with this customer to understand their needs and used our platform to implement a solution that established compliance and control while also giving the marketing team access to quality data that powers growth.

About the Implementation

The retailer andMetaRouter worked together to decide exactly how to achieve their seemingly disparate goals– keep data completely secure and use data to reach customers with relevant marketing.We believe data trust is a central competitive advantage. Brands who develop trust both mitigate risk and build profitable relation ships with customers.

• Private, Single-Tenant Deployment: The MetaRouter platform is installed within a private cloud instance.All data is processed within the organization’s private cloud, on their cloud provider of choice. MetaRouter has auditable access in order to provide support and updates, but doesn’t have any direct access to the customer data.
• Increase Site Performance and Security: MetaRouter eliminates as many 3rd-party tag/pixel fires as possible from the browser to improve site performance, user experience and compliance/security. In their place, the retailer is sending one,1st-party stream of data to the MetaRouter platform, which is then split into individual streams (and transformed) for each integration.
• Precise, Integration-Specific Configuration: MetaRouter encourages explicit definition of each user “event,” the data (and metadata) included within each event, and how a given event should be transformed prior to being shared with a vendor.Transformations include simple data structure changes like hashingPII and advanced, logic-based changes, like calculating pre-tax order totals. All of this processing occurs within the platform, rather than on the browser, and can be managed within the MetaRouter UI.
• Compliance Enforcement: When MetaRouter sees that a user-consent banner (via their provider,OneTrust) has stored a cookie containing user consent preference,MetaRouter enforces those instructions downstream by turning on or off the server-side integrations accordingly. Additionally, MetaRouter wipes any 3rd-party ID’s stored within its 1st-party identity graph that powers our solution.
• Identity Syncing for Anonymous Users: MetaRouter enriches the organization’s event stream with anonymous yet addressable identifiers, which powers downstream vendors’ capabilities including Google’s 360 Suite, Facebook, TradeDesk,Pinterest, and many more.
• Attribute Enrichment: Using the Sync-Injector’s ID syncing methodology, MetaRouter grabs demographic, social media, and other user attributes from data vendors and enriches them directly into events sent to the platform, as well as into static storage owned by the organization to create a complete 360-degree view of known users.

With a robust store of secure, first-party data, every other team in the organization can kick off new and exciting customer initiatives anytime—all the secure information they could possibly desire is at their fingertips.

Now, MetaRouter provides parity to the former client-side customer data network while significantly reducing the number of tag calls made from the browser.The executive team is excited to eliminate any reliance onAmazon, a critical competitor, and watch revenue rise; InfoSec is confident in the security of the data; and Marketing is thrilled to see increased web performance and better SEO, improved data accuracy and consistency across vendors, and the ability to attribute advertising across experiences, even for their anonymous users.

Establish data trust and future-proof your strategy with MetaRouter. Reach out to us to learn more.

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