Q&A: Or Lenchner, CEO, Luminati Networks

RTIH: Tell us about Luminati Networks and your USPs

Or Lenchner: Imagine you’re buying a shirt from your favourite e-commerce brand. It’s likely that, in order to decide the most attractive pricing for that shirt, the brand conducted market research using Luminati’s data collection automation platform. It’s the same for when you’re booking a flight. It’s likely the airline used Luminati’s platform to research their competition and tailor the most relevant package to you.

Luminati Networks is the world’s largest data collection platform dedicated to helping businesses gather publicly available online data in an ethical manner. Working with over 10,000 customers including market leaders from the Fortune 500, Luminati provides brands with a transparent view of the internet.

The company’s first-of-its-kind data collection automation (DCA) platform enables clients to view the internet through the eyes of their consumers and potential consumers, no matter where they are based in the world.

By scouring the web through the eyes of the consumer, organisations can collect data at scale and gain a real and accurate perspective of how their customers are interacting with their brand and with their competitors – without being blocked or served misleading information. This means organisations can now make better, more informed business decisions based on real-time competitive data.

RTIH: What should retailers and brands consider when choosing corporate data platforms?

OL: I hear people say that data is the new oil. At Luminati, we believe that data is like water, meaning it should be transparent and available to all organisations and consumers worldwide.

Data provides major opportunities, but also presents huge challenges. Businesses need to be able to wade through the huge amounts of irrelevant and inaccurate information online, if they are to access only the most valuable and relevant data to their business. Engineering this is an art and allows those analysing insights to make a real impact on a business’ success.

For example, many retailers are already using sophisticated algorithms for automated product pricing, meaning competitors must be equally fast and dynamic in gaining access to this information. There’s therefore a huge need for real time, pinpoint, high-scale intelligence collection.

Data collection is typically a manual, labour-intensive procedure, but it is now possible to accurately automate data collection, saving team members valuable time.

When looking for the right kind of data collection platform, I would recommend first making sure that your goals promote web-transparency – meaning an honest and open internet view so you can base your most critical decisions on the best most transparent data.

Today you need access to the right platform to ensure that you have the right kind of data to address your exact business needs. If you are consistently accessing wrong or old data, you’re putting your business at great risk.

You also need to proceed carefully to ensure that you are only gathering data that is publicly available in an ethical manner, following clearly defined guidelines and obviously data related regulations.

Any business aspiring to use data collection platforms at a large scale, must ensure they are embracing an ethical by-design approach, as legislation hasn’t yet caught up with the pace of technological innovation.

Data is a powerful tool and you must treat it with the utmost professional respect. At Luminati when we practice an ethical by-design approach, we make it our mission and practice it from the inside-out.

Whether it’s with our organisational culture, our comprehensive compliance processes or our rigourous customer on boarding process, we are well-aware of the power that data entails. We make sure that as a ‘source of life’ our customers’ and partners’ data is treated with the utmost respect and is kept safe.

“I hear people say that data is the new oil. At Luminati, we believe that data is like water, meaning it should be transparent and available to all organisations and consumers worldwide”

RTIH: What are the biggest challenges facing retailers and brands right now and how can Luminati help?

OL: Consumers are living an era of unprecedented choice, with record numbers of online retailers chasing a very limited amount of consumer capital. This makes for an extremely dynamic online economy, with a lightning quick, brutal pace of innovation.

As a result, consumers are increasingly favouring brands that represent values that are personally meaningful to the shopper. This requires successful retailers to have a deep, data driven, knowledge of the market if they want to be able to create offers that are sufficiently relevant, and helpful enough to drive engagement.

If brands want to be able to deliver the right products, at the right price, to the right people, they need the right data, and right research mechanism. With pricing personalisation becoming increasingly common, this represents another impediment to accurate data collection

RTIH: Are consumers winning when it comes to the collection of data?

OL: To put it simply – data collection encourages and promotes transparency and openness. This openness leads to open competition and the rest is clear. By creating a level playing field, global brands have the incentive to offer better priced and more attractive offers to consumers. They focus on creating tailored offers and products to their target audience. So, consumers are absolutely winning here.

I believe that data serves consumers and businesses’ interests as well as driving increased innovation and creativity. This is a direct and effective result of transparency and for this reason we will continue to drive for it and advocate transparency with everything we do.

RTIH: What can we expect to see from Luminati during 2020?

OL: We will continue to dedicate ourselves to innovation. Luminati releases over 40 version updates a day, an unprecedented rate for any company. We will also seek to promote ethical use of data as a top priority, ensuring that when a brand selects a data collection platform or vendor, it goes beyond looking at the performance only, but also closely assessing the ethical side of things.

 We will continue to push for regulation in our domain and will initiate more events and workshops around it – promoting and educating the market in every way we can. Last but not least, of course, we will drive for increased data collection automation to make the entire data collection process faster, more efficient and provide businesses with better, more precise results!