“Proprietary data” is the most-claimed and least-explained phrase in advertising. Here is what ours actually is: what it contains, how it is collected, and why consent is the load-bearing part.
What the data set contains
- App Detect: app ownership and usage signals across 18M+ mobile advertising IDs (MAIDs) in Canada, revealing real interests and behaviours rather than declared ones.
- Geo-location panel: 9M+ opted-in MAIDs generating 120+ location data points per user per day, showing where Canadians actually go, at national scale.
- Measurement layers: the same panel powers brand lift studies and foot-traffic attribution, so the data that targets a campaign can also prove it worked.
What “opted-in” means here
Every device in the panel shared its signals through explicit, revocable consent collected in the apps where the data originates. Devices that opt out leave the panel. That is the difference between a data asset and a liability: scale you can stand behind when a client’s privacy team asks how it was built.
Why this matters more every year
Third-party identity keeps fracturing. Safari and Firefox block third-party cookies outright, and the industry’s replacement schemes keep shifting under advertisers’ feet. Durable, consented, first-party-style data has stopped being a compliance checkbox and become performance infrastructure: it is what still works everywhere.
Canada has also set its own bar. Quebec’s Law 25 has been fully in force since September 2024, with penalties reaching into the tens of millions of dollars, and a federal successor to PIPEDA is working through Parliament. Consent-clean, Canadian-controlled data is now a prerequisite for buying media in this market, and an advantage for anyone who built for it early.
How it shows up in a campaign
In practice the data set does three jobs: it builds audience segments from observed behaviour rather than lookalike guesswork; it feeds measurement, from lift studies to store visits; and it informs creative, so the message matches the audience it reaches. Data decides who. Creative decides whether they care.
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