What are data consortiums?

Sometimes, a small group of organisations often operating in the same market sector will decide to pool their information to benefit everyone involved, but where no specific personal data is passed between companies in the group. These groups are sometimes known as "data consortiums".

We run a home shopping and direct retailer data pool on behalf of the member organisations to help the group share general insight and trends that their customers share, so that they can provide you with a better experience.

How does it work?

If you sign up to a product or service from an organisation who is a member of this group, you may agree to be contacted by them for marketing purposes. They might also have notified you that they may share your data with us, so we can help them to communicate with you more effectively and provide a better overall customer experience.

Our clients (who are the members of the consortium) share relevant customer transactional data with us – spend value, date of the most recent purchase and the types of product brought. We use this data to create anonymised and aggregated insight reports about the home shopping and online buying habits of consumers in the pool. This information is sent back to members, enabling them to avoid mailing consumers who are less likely to use home shopping, ensuring that only those individuals who are most likely to respond are targeted, and that offers are made via the consumer's preferred channel.

We do not use this data outside of the member group and at no point is the personal data provided to us by consortium members shared with any other members, nor do the reports we provide to members include data that can be used to identify you directly.

Members may also use the insight for marketing to help identify relevant new prospects (names and addresses) from our marketing database for a mailing where appropriate marketing permissions exist.


Digital identity solution

We also run a digital identity solution built using data from participating advertisers, publishers and data partners. Experian helps this group share audience data securely without them needing to disclose or move raw data between each other. This helps make the advertising they buy or sell more relevant. It also provides a way in which they can learn about audiences at high level without being exposed to data at a device or individual ID level.

How does it work?

If you visit the website of a participating company, you will be notified that they send your personal data (consisting of IP address and first party ID) to Experian. You will also be shown how to choose for this not to happen. We use the data they send us to create a connection between the audience of one website with another at an aggregated or anonymised level. Each company never sees the original data from the other websites, but are able to share information about their audiences with each other without physically moving or disclosing their data to anyone.

The personal data provided to us by participating partners is never shared, nor do the reports or service we provide include data that can be used to identify you directly.

Members may also use the insight for marketing to help identify relevant new prospects (names and addresses) from our marketing database for a mailing where appropriate marketing permissions exist however, they are never able to associate records from their own data with individuals in such mailings.