Consumer information

About Us

CACI is a provider of marketing services to many of the UK’s and world’s leading consumer brands. We provide data, software and consultancy services to help them market their products and services more effectively.

Data is an important part of modern business. Companies need to use data about their customers to ensure that they offer the right product or service to the right customer at the right time and in the right place. As consumers, we all create data about ourselves as we interact with our favourite brands in shops and online. CACI helps businesses make sense of all this data and this helps ensure more choice and better service for consumers.

We use data responsibly to create marketing services and products that give our clients a better understanding of their customers’ preferences, including what kind of marketing offers they would most like to receive and through what channels (post, telephone, email, etc). We also use data to help our clients find new customers. We do this with clients in many sectors of the economy, including financial services, retail, automotive, energy, telecommunications, leisure, charities and media.

We believe in being open and transparent about the data we hold and process about UK consumers. We are passionate about what we do and we believe data, when used responsibly, greatly benefits consumers, as well as our clients. Our aim in this section of our web site is to inform you, the consumer, about the personal data we may hold about you, how we use it in the work we do for our clients and to give you the opportunity to make informed choices about your data and whether you want it to be used for marketing purposes.

Our Products and Services

CACI provides a range of data services that help our clients make better marketing decisions. Some of these services use personal data.

Contact Data

We supply names and addresses to our clients from the edited Electoral Register and other appropriately permissioned lawful sources for them to send postal direct marketing communications to consumers who they think might be interested in their products or services.

We don’t supply telephone numbers or email addresses, but we do work with our clients to help them with email marketing campaigns where they have permission from their customers to contact them by email.

We also provide our data products to partners who help clients target their digital advertising such as Liveramp and addressable TV such as Sky. This ensures that adverts are targeted to the most appropriate audiences.

Segmentation and Profiling

Segmentation and profiling are an important part of marketing. Segmentation works by dividing people into groups or “segments” based on what they have in common with each other and what differentiates them from other groups. A simple example might be to segment a group of people based on age. If you are marketing financial services products like mortgages or pensions, you may want to target people based on age, so that you don’t contact older people with a first-time mortgage for example.

CACI has a variety of data products that segment or profile UK consumers into distinct types for marketing purposes. Our main consumer segmentation is called Acorn and many of the UK’s leading consumer brands, as well as a range of public sector bodies, use Acorn to understand the differing types of people who buy their products or use their services, as well as understand the types of people who live in different areas of the country.

We build Acorn from a wide variety of data sources, including Census data, other Government statistics, property data and market research data. This involves using statistical techniques to create a set of types of people with distinct characteristics. We then attach an Acorn type to every postcode in the country. Each Acorn type is given a name and a short description. An example of an Acorn type is “Comfortably off families in modern housing”. If you want to find out your own Acorn type, click here.

Acorn and our other segmentation data products can be attached to the names and addresses on a customer database and used to “profile” the database, i.e. understand the customers in terms of their differing demographic and lifestyle characteristics. This will allow the brand to communicate more effectively with these different types of customers. Acorn is also used to analyse the mix of people who live in a local geographical area or neighbourhood, for example the catchment of a store or a hospital.

Another important CACI segmentation product is called Fresco. Fresco is used by many of the UK’s leading banks, building societies and insurance companies to segment their customers based on their knowledge and use of financial services products.

Modelled Data

CACI’s modelled data products give brands insight about their customers and the neighbourhoods in which they live. CACI’s main modelled data set is called Ocean. Ocean is a file of names and addresses of UK consumers, based on the edited Electoral Register (see below), with several hundred modelled “scores” attached to each name and address.

CACI uses statistical techniques and anonymised market research and other data to create the “scores”, which are a statistical probability or likelihood of someone having a particular characteristic (we call them “variables”). An example might be the likelihood of someone reading a particular newspaper or donating to a certain type of charity. These variables can be added to a brand’s customer file by matching the names and addresses on Ocean to the names and addresses on the customer database. This will enhance the brand’s understanding of its customers and allow them to communicate more effectively with them. To help an organisation find new customers, CACI can supply a list of names and addresses from Ocean, selected using the variables most relevant to that brand’s marketing strategy.

Analytics

CACI offers a range of analytical services. We use our statistical data skills to help our clients understand more about their customers by analysing their data. We build bespoke segmentations of customers, based on information the brand already holds about them, such as what products or services the customer has bought from the brand and with what frequency. We might also build models to predict the likelihood of customers to buy another product or cancel a service or switch to another brand. In these cases, CACI is acting as a data processor on the instructions of the brand.

The data we hold and where it comes from

We obtain data about consumers from a variety of legally compliant sources. We do this to help our clients provide better services and a better experience for customers like you. Some data comes from reliable partners we have worked with for many years.

Some comes from market research surveys and some from Government and other public data sets.

Personal Data

This is data that can be used to identify someone. It would include things like your name and address, your telephone number or your date of birth. The main piece of personal data that CACI may hold about you is your name and address and this is taken from the edited Electoral Register.

When you register to vote, you are given the option of “opting-out” of having your name and address appear on the edited version of the Electoral Register.  If you don’t opt-out, your name is included on the edited version, often called the Open Register, which is available for companies like CACI to use for marketing and other legal purposes.  As you are asked to register to vote every year, you have an opportunity to opt-out every year as well.

In addition to names and addresses on the edited Electoral Register, we also obtain names and addresses from our partners, who collect data directly from consumers for marketing purposes and where CACI is named as a partner with whom the data is shared. CACI does not collect personal data directly from consumers for marketing or any other purpose.

Here is the list of our Partners

• WRM Media Ltd (Prize Reactor)
• My Offers
• Omnis Media Group
  • We send offers
  • Get me a ticket
• WebClubs
  • Vino Club
  • Homeowners Club
  • Gardeners Club
  • Travellers Club
  • Quiz Club
• Marketing Punch
  • OfferX
  • National Consumer Review

We use the name and address data we hold about you in two ways. We can pass your name and address to our clients, the household brands you deal with every day, so that they can contact you with offers of goods and services of interest to you.  Or where you are already a customer of one of our clients, we use your name and address to match to your name and address as it appears on our client’s database. We do this, so we can provide our clients with additional information about you, based on the segmentations and models we described above, so they can tailor their marketing messages to you.

Special Category Data

Data protection law defines special category data as sensitive personal data, such as ethnic origin, political views, trade union membership, medical information or sexual preferences. CACI does not knowingly obtain or process special category data.

We also do not obtain or process personal data about children.

Aggregated and anonymised data

A lot of the data that CACI holds and uses for marketing purposes is aggregated or anonymised. This means it cannot be used to identify an individual person. It is either data about households, properties or geographical areas, or it is data that may originally have had a personal component but where this has been removed, i.e. it has been anonymised.

Examples of the former would include property details, such type of property, type of tenure (rented or owned), value and age of property. Geographic information includes data from the Government’s Census of Population that gives aggregated statistics about the local population for small geographic areas of around 150 households.

Anonymised data would include information from market research surveys, which ask a sample of the population a range of questions about attitudes, lifestyles, what products and services they buy, what media they consume and so on. CACI uses statistical techniques to model the answers from such surveys to the general population, without knowing the identities of the people who answered the questions on the survey. This technique produces models that predict the likely characteristics of UK consumers who live in a certain neighbourhood or whose names we hold on our Ocean database (see above). This is not “real” data we know about you, but our estimate of your likely characteristics.

Anonymised data might also have originated in mobile location data or retail banking data as set out below:

Mobile location data:

Mobile phones can collect location data (where you are when – for example – you open or use a particular application on your device) and if you have given permission for this, several companies collect this data in order to provide it to their clients.  Often this is the way that the application is free of charge, as the app provider will be paid for the location data that is collected with your permission.

CACI receives pseudonymised location data from its suppliers.  This means that we will receive a list of approximate locations (covering around 600 square metres), of mobile devices (phones/tablets) and an indication of the type of area the owner of the device lives.  By ‘type of area’ we mean that we have access to other information that can describe an area, such as household make up – families, couples, empty nesters etc, the types of houses, the general demographic of the area.  CACI does not receive any other personal information about the owner of the device (such as name or address) and we ask our suppliers to exclude any location that may be the users home (for example where they tend to be at night).  This information is grouped together by CACI and used to give our clients an impression of the type and number of people who visit a particular location.

For example, if a company wants to open a new family restaurant, they will be interested in which areas of town see most footfall by people who have young families.  CACI and its clients have no interest in the identities of the owners of the individual mobile devices, but only in the total numbers of people involved.  This data can also be used to help local authorities see population movement to understand the degree and location of public service requirements

Retail Banking Data

We receive transactional data from our banking partner whose core business is managing debit card/current account loyalty schemes.  As a by-product of this work they are able to provide CACI pre-defined datasets: for example, we would receive a unique reference number for an individual, and then details of the amount they spend in different shops.  We have no information about the identity of the person.  We can then aggregate this information and provide it to our clients under licence. In case any of our clients have other information which might enable them to identify an individual by name, we prevent this by taking 3 main measures

a)      We only ever provide data at a Postcode sector level, we never provide individual-level transactional data to them ( so for example we might be able to identify that high spenders in brand A are likely to also spend in brand B but are unlikely to spend in Brand C. It is to allow retailers to understand their overall competitive position without knowing exactly which individuals are shopping in which brands

b)      Our supplier removes from the data any Postcodes which contain fewer than 6 individuals.  This helps us to avoid inadvertently identifying a person who might live, for example, in an isolated house which is the only house in its postcode.

c)      Our supplier applies a statistical technique that alters the data in a way that means it is still statistically useful to us, but is different enough from the true data that it is not possible for us (or our clients) to match it to an individual person.

If you want to find out what data we hold about you, click here.

Who uses our data?

CACI provides data to many of the UK’s and world’s leading brands, the very brands that you buy products and services from every day. They buy our data so that they can better understand you, their customer, and ensure they provide you with what you want from them. This will include more relevant marketing messages, delivered to you through the channel you prefer, including more relevant advertisements when you browse online. It will also include ensuring that shops and branches are opened in locations where you want to shop and include the range of products that you want to buy.

We work with clients in almost all sectors of the economy that are consumer facing. These include:

• Financial Services, including banks, building societies, insurance companies and credit card providers
• Retailers of all types
• Automotive companies
• Charities
• Media companies, including newspaper and magazine publishers and tv companies
• Energy and water suppliers
• Telecommunications companies
• Leisure groups, including restaurant and pub chains, cinemas, gyms
• Mail order companies
• Internet companies
• Packaged goods manufacturers
• Health and beauty
• Public and private health care providers
• Local and central government
• Housing, including private builders and developers and social housing providers
• Care homes
• Political parties
• Travel and transport, including travel agents, rail and bus operators and airlines
• We also provide data to advertising agencies and other marketing services businesses, who work on behalf of brands.  Some of these organisations are licensed to supply our data to their clients, but under strict contractual terms that ensure consumers’ interests are protected.  We only work with such organisations, where we know they have as a high a standard of data protection and information technology security as ourselves. The specific organisations involved are:-
  • DT Dynamics
  • Ginger Black Media
  • Epsilon
  • Arc Data
  • BBS
  • On Demand (Precision)
  • Indicia
  • Liveramp

How do you benefit?

We strongly believe that the work we do for our clients directly benefits the consumers whose data we process. We hope you do too. We are committed to being open and transparent about the use we make of your data, so you can form your own opinion. But here are some ways in which we believe we improve the experience you have when you deal with your favourite brands.

Marketing messages that are relevant and timely

Data is at the heart of personalised marketing communications. Brands don’t want to bombard you with marketing messages you don’t want to receive. They want to send you offers that are of interest to you and to send them to you at the right time and through your preferred channel, e.g. by email rather than post. CACI’s data helps them do this and provide you with a better experience.

Data helps brands understand what kinds of products and services you are looking to buy. This helps them innovate and develop new products to meet new consumer demands. The competition this entails also helps keep prices lower or fairer than they might otherwise be.

Ensuring more free content online

We all take for granted how much free information we access when we go online. A lot of this content remains free to us because the web site owners generate income from relevant advertising. Data from companies like CACI helps target this advertising so that it is relevant to those browsing the site.

Helping retailers put their outlets in the places you want to shop

A lot of the geographical and aggregated data that CACI provides is used by retailers and leisure providers to ensure they have their shops and branches in the right places, the places that you want to visit and shop. Our data is also used to ensure the products or services on offer in those outlets meets the needs of the shoppers in those locations.

Allocating resources effectively in the public sector

To deliver public services efficiently and in a timely manner, local and central government, the NHS and the emergency services use CACI data to plan the allocation of resources to meet the public’s needs.

The Law and your Data

In May 2018, new data protection laws came into force in the UK. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Data Protection Act 2018 sets out the rules under which personal data may be processed.  The GDPR is now, after the UK’s exit from the EU, incorporated into law in the UK, and is therefore still a relevant source of the rules that govern your rights, and our obligations, in relation to personal data.

There are six lawful grounds under which personal data may be processed. The two grounds that apply to the way CACI processes personal data are consent and legitimate interest. In most cases we will be processing your data under legitimate interest.

This means that CACI and our clients, the major consumer brands, have a legitimate interest to process personal data about you for the purposes of direct marketing to you. More specifically, consumer brands have a legitimate interest to process personal data so that they can find new customers and ensure they offer the right products and services to existing customers. CACI has a legitimate interest to process your data so we can help our clients market themselves to you more effectively and tailor their offers to your interests.

When we use legitimate interest as the legal grounds to process your data, we must take your own interests into account.  We must carry out what is called a “Legitimate Interest Balancing Test”. This means we and our clients must “balance” our legitimate interest to process your data for marketing purposes against your rights and interests and the potential impact on you of the proposed marketing activity.

We take data protection law and your rights extremely seriously. All the staff who work at CACI receive regular training in data protection and information security. We have very strict data security policies and systems that conform to the highest international security standards (ISO 27001) and which are independently audited on a regular basis. We have a culture of putting data security first and ensuring your data privacy rights are protected.

We will only keep data about you for as long as we need it for the purposes for which we use it. For example, the edited Electoral Register is compiled afresh every year. We only use the most recent version, collected in the previous 12 months, when we supply name and address data to our clients for them to contact you. In addition, we hold another five years of data for use in matching to our clients’ own customer files and for checking they have the right postal address for you. This older data is not used for contact purposes.

We only source personal data from suppliers who we know and trust, and where we are confident that they have the same high standards of data protection and information security as ourselves. We try to ensure that we only supply personal data to reputable brands, who we know will use that data in a responsible and ethical way. We do not supply personal data to organisations that work in sectors where we believe there may be an adverse effect on the consumer, for example debt collection, pay day loan companies or door-to-door selling.

CACI adheres to all the main industry standards on how personal data is used for marketing. These include “suppression schemes” where consumers have opted not to receive postal marketing or telephone marketing calls. We are active and involved members of the UK’s Data and Marketing Association (DMA) and abide by the DMA Code of Conduct. We do not process special category data (see above) or data on children.

Your Rights

We believe that the marketing products and services that we provide to our clients benefit consumers like yourself. We hope you agree. But we always want you to have the final say.

You always have the right to object to having your personal data used for direct marketing. Every time one of our clients contacts you using legitimate interest, they must give you the opportunity to opt out of having your data used by them in the future.

You can also ask CACI at any time to cease processing your data for direct marketing purposes. We will then add you to the suppression file we keep of consumers who do not want their data used for direct marketing. Any future requests from our clients for data for direct marketing are always screened against this file. This ensures your details are not passed on to our clients in the future.

If you do opt out, we will continue to process your personal data solely to maintain our suppression file.  We do this on the advice of the ICO so we can make sure your details are never passed on to our clients in case your details come to us in the future from a new source of data.  We will only ever process the minimum amount of data about you that enables us to identify you for this purpose and will not use it for any purpose other than suppression.

If you wish us to stop processing your data for direct marketing purposes and add you to our suppression file, please email [email protected]. We will process your request promptly, and ordinarily within 7 days but it may take up to three months before it becomes effective with all our clients, as they often plan marketing campaigns several months in advance.

You also have the right of erasure, i.e. you can ask us to delete any data we hold about you on our database. In addition, you have the right to access the data which means you can request to see the data which CACI hold about you. If you would like to exercise either of these rights, then please contact us at [email protected] and let us know.  As recommended by the ICO, we will need proof of your identity and address in order to carry out this request.

Opting out of receiving direct marketing communications from CACI and our clients does not mean your data will not be processed for marketing purposes by other organisations. If you wish to minimise the amount of direct marketing communications you receive, there are a number of industry opt out files you can subscribe to.

Postal Marketing

You can opt out of receiving direct mail by registering with the Mailing Preference Service. The MPS is administered by the Data and Marketing Association.

Telephone Marketing

You can opt out of receiving telephone marketing calls by registering with the Telephone Preference Services.

Email Marketing

There is no industry wide scheme for opting out of emails. If you receive emails from organisations you do not wish to hear from, you will need to unsubscribe via a link in the email.  For your information, CACI does not collect email addresses from individuals.

If you want to find out more about your personal data rights, you should contact the Information Commissioners Office (ICO).  The ICO is the UK’s regulatory organisation responsible for ensuring compliance with data protection legislation. The ICO’s web site has a section for the public that explains your data privacy rights in plain English.  You can access it here.