Anonymous Link System for Privacy-Preserving Offline Online Data Matching
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Solution Overview
Problem
The disconnection between offline and online marketing channels hinders targeted advertising due to privacy concerns and the lack of effective methods to associate consumer data across platforms without exposing personally identifiable information (PII), leading to inefficient marketing efforts and lower return on investment.
Innovation Solution
A method that associates consumer marketing information with online consumers using anonymous links and partner-encoded links, ensuring that PII is never exposed outside a protected environment, allowing for targeted online advertising while maintaining consumer privacy by using a cookie pool and hash algorithms to create de-identified data associations.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Measurement precision
If consumer PII is used to associate offline and online marketing data, then marketing targeting accuracy is improved, but consumer privacy protection deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The patent extracts PII from the data association process by using a separate PII repository that is never exposed to external systems. Only de-identified data with anonymous links is transmitted to online channels, while the PII remains isolated in the protected offline environment, thus achieving both accurate targeting and privacy protection
Solution Approach 2:
The patent introduces anonymous links as intermediaries that connect offline PII data with online marketing activities without exposing either side. These anonymous links serve as a secure mediator that allows data association while maintaining the privacy barrier, enabling targeted advertising without direct PII exposure
2Object-affected harmful factors
If anonymous links are used to protect consumer privacy, then privacy protection is improved, but the ability to tie offline and online channels deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The anonymous link system performs multiple functions: it serves as a unique identifier for tracking, a privacy protection mechanism, and a coordination key across channels. This universal approach allows the same anonymous link to enable targeted advertising, measure campaign effectiveness, and coordinate offline-online channels without compromising privacy
Solution Approach 2:
The patent implements feedback loops where anonymous links track consumer interactions across channels and feed performance data back to the marketing system. This enables continuous optimization of marketing campaigns while maintaining privacy, as the feedback mechanism uses only de-identified data with anonymous links
3Object-affected harmful factors
If PII is restricted for online marketing applications, then consumer privacy is protected, but marketing effectiveness analysis deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The patent creates copies of consumer data in de-identified form with anonymous links that can be freely used in online marketing analysis. These copies replicate the essential identifying characteristics needed for effective marketing analysis while containing no actual PII, thus enabling full marketing effectiveness analysis without privacy risks
Data Source
AI summary
A method and system for bringing together online and offline advertising uses anonymous links that are associated with consumer data. The anonymous links allow processing without personally identifiable information (PII) in a secure environment. Data is matched using the anonymous links, and further using identifiers that are encrypted for use in connection with individual match distribution partners. The method and system allows a marketer to utilize offline data to precisely target advertisements without the use of PII, and to perform analytics concerning the use of the online advertisements to more precisely determine the effectiveness of multichannel marketing efforts.