Affinity Answers Awarded Neutronian Certification Badge | MMA Global

Affinity Answers Awarded Neutronian Certification Badge

December 18, 2020
Submitted by Neutronian

December 9, 2020

Company completes rigorous audit process with Neutronian, an industry standard for independent data quality and compliance certification, highlighting its ability to leverage social insights in privacy conscious manner

AUSTIN, Texas, Dec. 9, 2020 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Affinity Answers, a leader in social-powered audience insights and activation, today announced it was awarded the Neutronian Certification Badge for its programmatic and addressable audience data. Affinity Answers joins a select cohort of flagship data providers to complete Neutronian's audit and receive its certification, including Eyeota, an Affinity Answers partner.

Neutronian exists to bring increased clarity and trust to the marketing ecosystem. Its "Certified by Neutronian" badge is underpinned by a proprietary evaluation process and helps brands, agencies, and investment firms identify high-quality, privacy compliant data providers for use in their campaigns and trading models.

Brands and agencies know how challenging it is to understand and trust the performance and compliance of marketing data today — especially with the inherent conflict of interest when data providers audit themselves. Neutronian addresses this critical need for increased transparency and eases the vetting burden on buyers by opening up the "black box" of marketing data.

Affinity Answers' mission is to improve marketing through brand advertising effectiveness, measurement and improvement. Data quality and compliance have always been at the heart of everything the company does, especially as it pertains to how it handles and utilizes data sourced from social media. Undergoing Neutronian's audit reinforces Affinity Answers' commitment to data transparency with trusted third-party validation and rigorous standards for retaining certification.

"Affinity Answers' approach to creating brand affinity audiences, leveraging contextual indicators and sentiment from anonymized social profiles, proves that data providers can utilize social media data in a privacy conscious manner," said Timur Yarnall, CEO and co-founder of Neutronian. "In this time of constant evolution of regulation and consumer sentiment, it is important for data providers to be mindful about how they are handling data and Affinity Answers demonstrated a thoughtful approach to this."

"Now more than ever, brands need trusted data solutions to be able to engage the right audiences with confidence and to ultimately drive their bottom lines," said Howard Luks, Managing Director, Americas at Eyeota. We commend our partner, Affinity Answers, for its Neutronian certification and joining us as an early adopter of the industry's first data compliance and quality standard."

To earn a Neutronian Certification Badge, data providers must undergo a comprehensive audit and meet baseline criteria across five main categories. Aspects evaluated within each category include:

  • Consent and compliance – Neutronian confirms appropriate privacy compliance and disclosures (ex. GDPR, CCPA, etc.) as well as proper data storage and accessibility controls.
  • Sourcing transparency – The badge verifies that providers are transparent about all of their data sources and data uses as well as confirming that they have a seamless opt-in/out process.
  • Dataset characteristics – Neutronian reviews the type(s) of datasets incorporated in the providers' data solutions and examines their cleansing practices – de-duplication, removal of fraudulent data, etc.
  • Methodology and processing – Quality assurance practices, data processing and retention controls are verified as well as the providers' use of statistical methodologies – modeling, weighting, etc.
  • Performance – The Neutronian Certification process reviews the methods used to evaluate the accuracy and performance of the providers' data solutions and the cadence at which they are conducted.

To retain their certification, data providers are subject to manual re-audits at least twice annually or whenever a fundamental methodology change is made to their data set. With the award of the Neutronian Certification Badge, Affinity Answers will enable Neutronian to continuously monitor its data for the purposes of ongoing quality assurance and anomaly detection.

"The marketing and consumer insights industries have hit an inflection point when it comes to data, and it's clear that the next phase of adoption and growth requires increased transparency around data quality and compliance," said Josh Raper, VP of Marketing for Affinity Answers. "Our objective has always been to demonstrably increase brands' efficiency and effectiveness, and this certification with Neutronian reinforces this promise, giving our customers added confidence when making important data-driven business decisions."

To learn more about Affinity Answers and its Neutronian Certification Badge please visit: https://www.affinityanswers.com/neutronian/

About Affinity Answers
Affinity Answers is a leader in social-powered insights that enable marketers and consumer insights professionals to identify and activate passionate fans across every screen. More than 400 global brands, agencies and AdTech partners trust Affinity Answers to drive increased scale and return on ad spend. The company's TrueAffinity® model analyzes billions of social engagements between consumers and brand entities, and combined with partner data, powers audience recommendations that can be activated across TV, social media and programmatic campaigns. FanFinder 360°, the company's all-in-one platform, enables TV and streaming marketers to uncover the shared positive affinities between passionate fans of shows and everything else they love across the world of social media. Affinity Answers was founded in 2005 and is headquartered in Austin, Texas, with R&D operations in India. For more information visit http://www.affinityanswers.com.

About Neutronian
Neutronian is a SaaS platform company providing the industry's most comprehensive independent data certification program. We offer a quality and compliance "credit score" rating of marketing data that brings much needed clarity and trust to the ecosystem. To us, data quality means more than just performance and accuracy – it includes everything that a marketer or brand needs to know about a dataset before using it. With our thorough approach to data certification, data buyers have the transparency they need to make data driven marketing decisions and high-quality, privacy compliant data providers can be rewarded for their efforts. For more information visit neutronian.com.