Privacy and performance go hand in hand: Q+A with InfoSum’s Lauren Wetzel

On March 5, InfoSum CEO and Board Director Lauren Wetzel travelled from the US to be a keynote speaker at IAB NZ’s first event of the year. The three-hour session, 2025 Digital Outlook: The First Party Future, sold out in 24 hours but Wetzel sat down with Zahra Shahtahmasebi ahead of her address to talk all things data – from first-party to clean rooms.

StopPress: Lauren, thank you for making the time to talk to us! Tell me a little about what you will discuss at IAB’s 2025 Digital Outlook event and what you hope to gain from being here in Aotearoa?

Lauren Wetzel: It’s all around driving the message that you can do better with privacy but it doesn’t come at the expense of performance. Often when people imagine doing right by the consumer and having more privacy-safe technology in place, that means you’re no longer going to be able to drive and find that consumer, or measure the effectiveness of the ad. That’s just not true.

We’ve been able to prove that privacy and perfomance go hand in hand and there’s actually a lot more you can do when you identify new partners you can collaborate with.

Yes, technology like InfoSum is new and a different way of thinking about it… and when you lean into it, the rewards on the other side are future-proofing your marketing strategies, not risking the privacy of your consumer data and having more effective advertising. Never has there been a time where brands need to prove ROI more than they do today.

SP: What would be some of the biggest challenges you see that prevent people engaging with new technology?

LW: The feeling that you need very technical data scientists is often a fear that I get and people don’t have the resources to invest. However, our technology was built to be used by marketers and analysts so ease of use is really important.

Secondly, trying to figure out what use case to get started with, so I always recommend to clients to think about the biggest challenge they have and start there.

Thirdly, finding partners that you trust and want to work with. But with InfoSum allowing you to maintain control of your data, you don’t have to trust partners with your consumer information. And so we’re starting to see companies find new partners faster, as well as normally competitive companies working together – it’s all boats rise type of market that can be enabled with this technology.

With control comes speed and with speed comes testing and learning and the ability to see what’s working for you.

SP: What are some of the key trends in digital advertising that the industry here in Aotearoa should be aware of in 2025?

LW: First party data use – instead of talking about cookies going away, talk about the application of first-party data that can be powered and put to good use to drive performance. McDonald’s Monopoly campaign last year is a good example of this.

Another big theme is interoperability across identities and cloud environments. You should be able to collaborate and shouldn’t have to dictate where your partner’s data sits while still maintaining the same level of protection and security.

It wouldn’t be an interview in 2025 if we didn’t mention AI. I see AI playing a huge role in the ease of onboarding new clients and interrogating data to find answers. Before you just embrace this model or that model, you need to be really mindful of what you’re collecting and how you’re managing and protecting that data.

SP: The words ‘data clean room’ get thrown around a lot – can you tell me how marketers and advertisers use these?

LW: It’s a secure instance where insights can be extracted but the data is never shared and never moved. The data is represented by mathematical models – you can create a new audience segment, run a campaign, measure the results by bringing together different parties but everyone maintains control of their own data.

The reason I don’t like the term is that the category hasn’t really been helpful to drive standardisation – it makes it seem like the data is coming together, but the whole idea is that it is decentralised. A term we’ve started using with our clients instead is private data networks.

I think we’ll start to see new products come out in market and what I’m hoping for is that we won’t talk about data clean rooms, we will just talk about this propensity tool for marketers to drive perfomance and outcomes.

You have an easier way for a marketer to prove that something’s more valuable, then you can obviously charge more for it and it just becomes a healthier ecosystem in general and the fact that you’re also doing right by your consumers is a really important benefit.

SP: Tell me a little bit about InfoSum and your journey there.

LW: I have been CEO since September 2024, so half a year in the seat. Prior to that, I was the Chief Operating Officer for over four years.

The story to InfoSum is a good one because I started as a client at a large telecommunications company – we were looking for technology that allowed us to maintain control of our consumer data. I led an investment in InfoSum, then I joined full-time shortly after. I knew this technology would change advertising and the way that data would power ad products.

SP: What is it that makes you so passionate about this space?

LW: Privacy is a basic human right and it seems like the ad industry has forgotten about that. For the goal of monetising data we’ve completely eroded consumer trust and I think we have an obligation to do better.

I am a strategist, a businesswoman and I care about thriving ad ecosystems and businesses and so my pursuit of doing better by the consumer is also in pursuit of effective advertising products that can enable a healthly open internet and power journalism.

It goes back to privacy and performance. They’re not at odds. You can maintain control of data, collected with consent and then use that to power a new product to help fund important content for your consumers.

SP: What does your ideal world look like in the world of data and advertising?

LW: More collaboration and competition and more standards for privacy and privacy-enhancing technology. Don’t shortcut it. We got it wrong the first time. Cookies never should have been the tool that we used to target. Passing data from campaign to campaign and system to system was not right and I think there’s a better way to do it.

Two of our values at InfoSum are ‘challenging the status quo’ and ‘levelling the playing field’. Both are at play here. Collaboration can help level the playing field – you can all drive more value from data when you come together. Challenging the status quo means let’s put our heads together and think outside the box, let’s make this market more relevant. Let’s prove we can increase the value of this market, not shrink it.

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