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Confection Wants to Usher In the Future of Server-Side Martech

What Problem Are You Trying to Solve?

The end of third-party cookies is about more than just browser-level data storage. It represents the end of the way marketers, advertisers, and developers have gathered, used, and monetized online data for 30 years.

Google and Apple’s recent privacy announcements and GDPR are common knowledge. But even professional marketers often aren’t aware these “privacy-first” changes have impacted our productivity and spending since 2017, when Safari and Firefox stopped supporting third-party cookies.

20-25% of people use those browsers so the investments we make in many CRMs, DSPs, ads, and other martech tools are — at most — 75-80% effective. That’s years of waste compounding every day. By 2023, Chrome will work like Safari and Firefox. Now, 75% of web users are impacted, making many tools < 25% effective. In this reality, martech and adtech customers now waste $0.75 of every $1 spent.

Quimby Melton, Confection’s Co-Founder & CEO

Why Is This?

Privacy-first browsing environments disable trackers, pixels, scripts, tags, and cookies. Marketing tools that rely on these client-side resources often don’t work properly. Event tracking fails. Forms break. Ads disappear. Data stops flowing. This leaves marketers and advertisers unable to accurately track view rates, conversions, and build effective data sets.

The front end has become fragile, dysfunctional, and unreliable.

Over the past thirty years, we’ve essentially transformed client-side data into a tragedy of the commons. Everyone’s inexpensive, easy-to-access property is no one’s property. And the self-interested, uncoordinated actions of marketers and technology companies have depleted the value of this resource.

Now, we have to move on.

How Are You Solving That Problem?

At a high level, Confection’s leading an exodus, one that moves from the exhausted front end to the fertile lands of privacy first and the server side.

We want to give the web its own centralized, proprietary standard for collecting, storing, and transmitting data. And we want to give everyday web users more control over the data they share. We hope this helps rejuvenate, enhance, and preserve the value of this important social resource.

Confection uses an innovative server-side architecture to collect, store, and distribute data. It’s unaffected by browser-side disruptions involving cookies, cross-domain scripts, fingerprinting, device IDs, and ad blocking. Confection is also compliant with global privacy laws like GDPR, CCPA, and LGPD so it’s good for people too.

Confection is not your new CRM, DSP, or other martech app. Instead, Confection supercharges your existing marketing stack and keeps data flowing in privacy-first environments. It integrates with the apps businesses and developers already use so there’s no need to switch systems. Just plug in, power up, and keep your marketing partnerships running strong.

Use Confection to help your business grow. Build better, more durable customer relationships. Build compliant, first-party data sets you can use in any number of ways and send to any number of different endpoints.

Confection’s Logo

How Has the Pandemic Impacted Your Company? Where Do You See Your Company Going In 5 Years?

I’m a systems-oriented, marketing operations person. That’s my native professional space. So when I consider the future of our field, I can’t help but think of Scott Brinker’s famous martech infographic. Every year it gets bigger and bigger. In 5-10 years, it’s hard to imagine how enormous it’ll be.

Many of my fellow marketers read this infographic as evidence that the martech SaaS landscape is highly (and perhaps fatally) fragmented. I have a different point of view:

The infographic confirms there’s a lot of red-ocean activity in martech and adtech. That’s undeniable. But if the market were truly fragmented, I think you’d see a lot more attrition and a lot more product churn. These would cause the infographic to shrink (or, at least, stabilize). Instead, it grows explosively, year after year. Instead, it’s reasonable to expect the marketing technology market will experience a CAGR of 30-50% in the next five years just as it has in the past five. The boundaries of the martech world keep expanding, and the lifeforms that call that space home continue growing and diversifying right along with it.

Marketing is, arguably, the most difficult challenge any enterprise faces. Building the right messages, channels, and internal “pipes” that allow a business to command attention, bring people into the funnel, and do something meaningful with them once they arrive — there are as many solutions to that problem as there are companies in the world.

Confection keeps relevant data safe from disruptions in the server-side of things

I think of martech like a multiverse: Every company has a unique set of needs and goals, and that creates a large number of stack permutations and sub-permutations. Diversity of needs, systems, and outcomes — I think this is why martech is such a rich ecosystem. This is why it can support a sort of Cambrian explosion year after year after year.

Data is the lifeblood that allows this biodiversity to flourish. And in 5-10 years, I expect both it and martech to have continued their explosive growth.

Note, the pandemic did little to interrupt this growth. If anything, it amplified it. Virtual tools — and the data they rely on — are more important than ever. WFH seems to be becoming more and more ingrained each day so there’s little reason to suspect this accelerating growth won’t continue.

Within this context, our team wants to make Confection the new standard by which data flows online.

I like to ask people to imagine that the cookie has been centralized and proprietary since the early 1990s. We’d have 30 years of global, platform-agnostic form submissions, content interactions, and other marketing data. This data would be organized, accessible by web users, and compliant with whatever policies and laws were in effect when it was collected.

What territorial campaign couldn’t you launch from that beachhead? What ambition wouldn’t that sort of capital support? In 5+ years, when Confection has established itself as this repository of important information, we have any number of different paths we can follow. Our tend to customers contribute the very best ideas so, as we add more and more to our ranks, I’m sure we’ll have opportunities we can’t even imagine right now.

What Is the Next Big Challenge in Information Security? How Do People Get Involved/Buy into Your Vision?

Rebuilding trust with everyday web users — this is the biggest challenge in information security today.

We have a “NSFW page” on our site where I log all the heated, aggressive feedback and critiques we receive. My co-founder and I have been threatened, told to commit suicide, and received quite a few (often funny) vulgarities. This is just a sample of how badly damaged data-enabled companies have allowed their relationship with everyday web users to become.

I try to initiate a dialogue with any NSFW feedback that comes in, no matter how vile or disquieting it is. And I tell all of them the same thing: Circle back in a few months or a year and hold me accountable. We take data privacy seriously, and our team’s goal is to build a new data “grid” that’s complaint with global privacy laws like GDPR, CCPA, and LGPD.

As we outline here, Confection aspires to be as good for people as it is for marketers and software companies.

Our team believes in privacy first. Putting this into action, we’re working hard to build the new standard by which personal data is collected, stored, and distributed online. We want to help companies thrive in the new reality, and we want to give people greater control over what they share online.

Confection’s product architecture complies with international data privacy laws and the personal preferences of everyday users. This helps us:

  •  improve the ways businesses and consumers dialogue with one another
  •  boost trust between people and the businesses they rely on
  •  improve the ROI of enterprise marketing efforts
  •  give people better control over their personal data

Anyone can create an account and start using Confection for free at confection.io

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