Italians unveil big data management initiative for marketers

The Italian Advertisers’ Association (UPA) recently launched NESSIE (“Next Generation System for Strategic Insights Exploitation”), an innovative initiative for big data management in marketing communications. Created in response to GDPR, it aims to bring together brands to share knowledge and insights and collaborate on projects, technology development and growth opportunities around data-driven marketing.

The initiative indicates the desire of brands to take back control of their data-driven marketing and to invest significantly in new digital advertising models, significant technological synergies and greater efficiency of internal company structures.

Developed in partnership with Neodata Group which specialises in digital innovation and big data, NESSIE was born out of collaboration between UPA and major Italian and multinational brands including Bolton, Henkel, Nestlé, Perfetti, Piaggio and Valsoia.

Through NESSIE, UPA will focus on the following needs of brand owners: transparency on data quality; transparency on data processes and roles involved; visibility of data flows and uses; valorisation of first-party data (the data of exclusive ownership of individual companies); autonomy of the brand on information sharing procedures; and compliance with GDPR.



The first concrete application of NESSIE is the creation of a ‘data lake’ for participating companies. The data lake or ‘cookie pool’ allows the collection and coding of data from websites and digital campaigns of participating companies and enriching cookies by using artificial intelligence algorithms applied to the data and insights collected from different brands. Companies are then able to have more in-depth collaborations with other NESSIE participants and third parties.

Next steps for UPA’s NESSIE include the expansion of the data lake and providing trainings for member companies and new talent.

For more information, please contact UPA.