CEO reveals how to achieve precise identity resolution, counter synthetic fraud, and master ethical, live-time data without sacrificing consumer trust.
Bill, your career has taken you from engineering to data strategy and now to leading Celebrus. What’s been the common thread driving your professional path so far?
I’ve always had a passion for making tech and data easier to understand, and that principle has been a common thread through my entire career. I’ve also focused on not getting complacent and always challenging the status quo, which couldn’t be more true of our journey at Celebrus.
One of the major challenges today is using data responsibly. How do you define ethical data use in an era where personalization and privacy are often at odds?
Perhaps this will upset people, but I don’t actually think personalization and privacy are at odds. The people who want personalized experiences opt-in to those, and the people who don’t can still get relevant content delivered to them in a variety of ways that doesn’t sacrifice privacy or break that trust as a brand. It is definitely more difficult to balance and manage, but it is completely doable if you put in the time and effort as a brand.
Synthetic fraud is gaining ground in the digital space. What makes this threat different from traditional fraud, and how should businesses rethink their approach to combating it?
Fraud will always evolve, and the massive speed at which the adoption of AI has grown recently is yet another issue to address. Synthetic fraud is all about building fake identities with a mix of real and fake data, but at the end of the day it’s still a fraudster trying to trick a brand. I think that businesses get really hung up on designing state-of-the-art fraud prevention strategies but skip the basics. Stronger identity verification standards, better digital data evidence, and some simple blocking and tackling for typical fraud behaviors can go a long way.
With browser-based cookies on their way out, how are brands adapting their data strategies to maintain relevance and accuracy in targeting?
Browser-based cookies are not on their way out. The internet runs on them. There are simply different flavors of cookies, and the bad ones are being sussed out and blocked and/or restricted. For example, if you are using a third-party cookie that follows people around the web, you are blocked. If you’re setting a first-party cookie server-side that is only used on your owned channels (i.e. your website(s), your mobile app(s), then you are fine when you combine that with adherence to opt-in and opt-out.
You’ve often emphasized identity as a critical component of data quality. How does Celebrus enable more precise identity resolution without compromising privacy?
We think of identity as 3 phases: anonymous (never been on the site before on that device), authenticated (logged in during the current session), and known to Celebrus (logged in previously, but not logged in now). “Known to Celebrus” is where we break away from our competitors. When you combine that with our identity graph and profile builder, this gives brands a massive value-add when it comes to better understanding customers and how to best service them.
There’s growing concern about consumers’ lack of visibility into how their data is used. How does transparency influence long-term trust and engagement?
Education and transparency are the two main ways to build trust. Outline how you, as a brand, are going to use the data and also make sure you outline the benefits to the consumer. Make it clear where the data will live, who has access, etc. There is so much clickbait out there, and people trying to create fear on topics like cookies, that candidly it is really difficult for anyone not intimately familiar with our industry to have a clue.
Bridging the gap between digital interactions and in-store behavior is a holy grail for many companies. How close are we to achieving a true online-offline customer view?
How close are we? You can do it today. The tech exists, and there are incredible stories I could tell of brands doing just that. How often are brands able to do it? I’d say less than they would want you to believe. Much of this is driven by using technologies that aren’t fit for purpose when it comes to integrating with offline data sources.
Industry jargon can often cloud the real issues. What are some common misconceptions you encounter when businesses talk about data-driven personalization?
The most flagrant jargon in our industry is the term ‘real-time’ followed by ‘first-party.’ Real-time has lost all value as a term as the definition varies from vendor to vendor, yet all of them deliver data in different times. To some, it means minutes. To others, it means hours. For Celebrus, it’s milliseconds, which is why we call it ‘live-time’ to try and break away from the pack. With ‘first-party,’ I see vendors every day claiming they are first-party, but it’s marketing jargon that doesn’t really paint the correct picture. If the data is going somewhere outside of your organization, it’s not first-party.
From a leadership perspective, how do you keep your team focused on solving real-world problems instead of getting caught up in the latest tech trends?
We look at our product roadmap from 3 perspectives: what we see in the industry, what our clients tell us, and what our partners tell us. From there, we need to focus on what we think is commercially viable or what we think will advance our differentiators. Having clear KPIs for how we define success for new features helps us stay focused.
Looking ahead, what role do you see Celebrus playing as businesses move toward a future shaped by real-time data, evolving regulation, and rising consumer expectations?
I believe our approach and our platform is on the forefront of what data technologies should be doing to help brands navigate our ever-changing digital world. We make digital data easy to capture, we solve for digital identity in a compliant manner, and we currently operate in over 30 countries in some of the heaviest regulated industries in the world today.
A quote or advice from the author : “I love the Ted Lasso advice to be curious. Don’t settle for the status quo. Question everything and be skeptical of vendor marketing materials. If a vendor can’t show you how to deliver your use case exactly in their solution, then they probably can’t do it.”
Bill Bruno
Chief Executive Officer, Celebrus
Bill is the CEO of Celebrus and has over 20 years of experience in media, data, and analytics. He has a passion for working with brands to solve some of the most complex challenges in the industry today and prefers to simplify these topics into easy to understand, pragmatic strategies.