Verisk Marketing Solutions Doubles Down on Data Integrity with Strategic Hire of Christine Frohlich as Head of Data Governance

As the digital world accelerates, concerns about data privacy and data misuse continue to be top of mind.

In its first strategic hire since its inception earlier this year, Verisk Marketing Solutions welcomes Christine Frohlich as Head of Data Governance, doubling down on its commitment to data integrity. Data governance is the process of regulating the availability, integrity, and security of organizational data based on both internal data standards and external privacy regulations. Verisk Marketing Solutions understands the importance of providing effective, reliable, and privacy compliant data and is excited to welcome Christine to grow a market-leading data governance program.

“Data governance is the glue between what is considered a traditional compliance organization and business operations,” says Christine. “At its core, data governance is about businesses having the people, processes and technology in place to know the data lineage and how the data is being stored, accessed and used and then managing those processes operationally.”

With over 20 years in the marketing services industry, Christine joins Verisk Marketing Solutions from a long-tenured career at Experian, where she oversaw and expanded numerous critical business sectors. From building new data products and forging strategic data relationships to developing data quality initiatives, critical information assets have always been a common thread that connected her career path. She was most recently responsible for directing Data Operations and the regulatory compliance program for CCPA, CPRA, and other legislation at Experian. This experience, combined with her product manager background, led to her passion for data governance and using it to help improve customer trust in the industry.

“It became clear to me that data governance was the ‘next big thing’ in marketing. The product manager in me knew that data governance would create a host of new market needs – and the challenge to solve those needs would drive innovation,” added Christine.

Christine lives in South Dakota with her husband, daughter and their dog, Digby. On most weekends, Christine may be seen cheering on her daughter at swim meets. Her go-to plan in times of uncertainty is a vacation with family and friends, and spending time outdoors.

We spoke with Christine about her new role, touching on the evolution of data governance, challenges and best practices as well as why she chose to join Verisk Marketing Solutions.

Data Governance has emerged from behind the curtain.

Over her decades long career, Christine has seen data governance go from operating as a behind the scenes activity to becoming a strategic business driver, impacting a host of operational decisions such as technical product architecture to vendor selection and even campaign performance measurement.

“I believe data governance is the driving force of the next major transformation in the marketing services industry. It has the potential to be as impactful as digital has been, as companies turn toward data governance to manage emerging privacy regulations,” explains Christine.

Christine expects that a record number of companies and solutions will emerge to address advertiser’s growing needs to improve data governance in order to maintain consumer trust (with their data).

In her new role, Christine wants to make clear that Data Governance is its own discipline.

Effective and impactful data governance is not a part-time job or side of the desk task for the existing compliance, security, product or data management teams.

“Data governance is not a carve-out project with a beginning or an end,” Christine says. “Companies should create an ongoing program that can scale, leveraging the technologies at their disposal.”

Christine’s personal best practices for data governance include understanding how informational gaps impact your risk profile, centralizing documentation and making the documentation discoverable, and ensuring each staff member that touches data knows and recognizes that they are a data steward.

Data Governance’s dynamic function in business presents a number of challenges.

Christine shares the three biggest data governance challenges that today’s organizations face.

• Staying up to speed on the fast-moving changes related to state privacy law is a tall task but it is key to data governance proficiency.
• Unfortunately, not all businesses and business leaders understand the importance of data governance. Engaging the C-suite to align strategy and resources to support holistic data governance ensures effective data stewardship and also mitigates organizational risk.
• With a lack of transparency in the data services industry, it is critical to find strategic partners and vendors that want to engage in data governance versus running away from it.

Christine chose Verisk Marketing Solutions because of their emphasis on Data Governance.

“It was clear to me that VMS’s data governance philosophy seamlessly aligns with its holistic organizational promises, purpose and people priorities,” explains Christine. “Data stewardship was already a large part of their culture at the level many other companies have yet to achieve and now they are cementing their commitment to data governance with this new department.”

Verisk Marketing Solutions has a heritage of addressing marketers challenges on clarity and trust, as this is how Jornaya was founded – to solve for confidence, clarity and trust in the lead gen ecosystem – and is the basis for Infutor’s core value proposition. Christine also mentioned that she respects VMS’ direct relationships with behavioral data creators, as it helps address the lack of transparency in the industry.

As for the future of her role at VMS, Christine says this:

“Data governance will continue to be a key tenet of VMS’ value proposition – ensuring ‘privacy by design’ is action not just words, creating solutions and tools to help marketers manage data privacy requirements and improving our data architecture to ensure appropriate data handling procedures. At VMS, my main goal is to make sure data governance continues to get its proper due, as I believe it has the potential to be a main deciding factor on who advertisers will choose to work with in the future.”