BrightTag Launches to Put Website Owners in Control of their Data

– Industry’s First Data Rights Management Platform™ for Marketers and Publishers to Control their Most Important Asset – their Data
– Technology to Control Partner Tracking Tags, Protect Against Data Leakage and Transparently Facilitate the Monetization of First Party Data

Chicago, IL – BrightTag™ publicly announced the launch of their company, which provides a data sharing solution that simplifies and streamlines the growing complexity and increasing difficulty of managing tracking tags and data transmission to third parties.  BrightTag’s platform enables website owners and their agencies to control, protect and monetize their most valuable resource, their data.

Every website owner today – ecommerce companies, publishers, social networks – all are feeling the effects of data leakage and it’s simply too hard to work with third party partners, no matter how trusted these partners are.  Browsers are filled with tracking tags, IT departments are burdened with manual processes and marketing and ops teams are at their wits’ end.  BrightTag has introduced a new way to help website owners manage the valuable data that drives their business online. With BrightTag, website owners and agencies can work with marketing partners in minutes without ever bothering IT, and more importantly, control what data is shared with each partner.

“We’ve been watching the development of BrightTag’s technology for nearly a year now, and feel confident that they are solving a problem that our industry needs solved now as the data markets are poised to explode,” said Sean Cheyney, Vice President, Marketing and Business Development, AccuQuote.  “The time-savings and opportunity to innovate their technology provides is incredible.  My team can enable a new marketing partner in less than five minutes, but more importantly we can now manage our ownership of data.  That’s where BrightTag’s technology really excels.”

As media, creative, analytics, and related technologies continue to fragment, the cost, time, complexity, and risk of distributing data to hundreds of potential partners has risen exponentially. BrightTag enables website owners to replace the chaos and time delays of data integration with a single durable BrightTag that gives them unbiased and trusted control, while ensuring that media buyers won’t experience similar value diminishment from their campaigns.

“Today, revenue, data and privacy are more intertwined than ever, forcing website owners to find a way to gain control,” said Mike Sands, former CMO and COO of Orbitz and now BrightTag’s CEO.  “Many marketers and publishers have no idea how many different kinds of data aggregation occur on nearly every site, including top 50 sites.  The less control that website owners maintain from all the companies who touch their site, the less value they’ll retain.  That’s where we come in, with technology that helps website owners manage the data they own to help retain its value.”

Company founder and Chief Revenue Officer, Marc Kiven, a member of the Atlas DMT founding executive team, former SVP of Corporate Development at Right Media and co-founder and COO of Centro, set out to build BrightTag with the realization that the process of data sharing through “tracking tags” had not progressed beyond the early days of ad serving.  With the recognition that the market was lacking an effective solution to help website owners better manage the high volume of tracking tags necessary to do advanced targeting, BrightTag soon moved from the development of a simple container tag with its beta partners to the industry’s first Data Distribution Server™.

Optimizing tag management and creating new more robust and trusted measures for data sharing eliminates operational headaches, creates efficiencies, and increases ad revenue and other monetization opportunities for publishers while benefiting marketers by reducing friction in the interactive media ecosystem.  By establishing a common foundation for normalized metadata, BrightTag creates a triangle of benefit for buyers, sellers, and consumers.

Beyond its core management team of Sands, Kiven and Eric Lunt, BrightTag’s CTO and former co founder and CTO of Feedburner (GOOG), industry veteran adviser Scott Lipsky, former founder and CTO of Avenue A | Razorfish and Atlas DMT and Joe Doran, former chief of staff at MSN and former CEO of Media6Degrees are among the many industry leaders helping BrightTag create a new standard for improved data sharing practices.

“The reception we’ve seen from the market has been exhilarating,” said Sands.  “We believe there is a role for a trusted and unbiased third party to help website owners and agencies get back in control of their data and we expect our technology solutions to provide tremendous value for the entire ecosystem.”

About BrightTag
BrightTag provides data management solutions that enable online publishers and marketers to streamline the management and complexity of advertising and data-gathering tags. The company is based in Chicago, IL, with offices in New York and Palo Alto.  For more details on products and services, please visit: www.thebrighttag.com.