IP and Data Ownership
Last updated: 19 April 2026
This is a plain-English summary intended for homepage FAQs, onboarding, and client-facing explanation. It is not contract language. The binding terms are in the retainer agreement you sign.
1. Your data stays yours
When you give us your media spend data, customer records, and campaign results, they remain your property. We use them to do your analysis. We do not sell them, share them with other clients, or use them for any purpose outside your engagement with us.
When your engagement ends, you can ask us to return your data in a portable format or delete it entirely. We will confirm in writing when that is done.
2. Your deliverables are yours
Every report, model output, and recommendation we produce for you is yours from the moment we deliver it. You can forward it, publish it, present it to your board, or use it as the basis for media investment decisions. No restrictions. No licence fees. No requirement to credit us.
3. Our engine stays ours
The software we use to do the analysis, the methodology that drives it, the rulebooks that translate your data into model inputs, and the priors methodology that gives your first run a head start, these belong to Acera. Receiving a deliverable does not give you a copy of the underlying code or a licence to our methods. You are buying the output, not the factory.
4. The Priors Bank: how pooled knowledge works
Our models get better over time because we pool statistical patterns from past client engagements into what we call the Priors Bank. Here is what that means in plain terms.
What goes into the pool
The statistical summaries the model learned about how channels behave in your category, not your raw data. Things like paid search tending to saturate at a rough spend level for a category in a market. These patterns are expressed as probability distributions, stripped of anything that could identify you, and mixed in with patterns from at least four other clients in the same category before they appear in any aggregate.
What never goes into the pool
Your name, your ABN, your campaign spend in dollars, your vendor names, your creative strategy, or anything that could reconstruct who you are.
Your competitors never see your numbers
They see pooled patterns too broad to trace back to any single contributor. The same way an industry benchmark does not reveal which companies contributed to it.
Opt-in by default, one click to opt out
Contributing to the pool is switched on when you sign up because it makes the whole system better for everyone, including you. If you want to opt out, there is a single toggle in your dashboard under Settings, Data Sharing. Switching it off takes effect immediately for any future pooling. No penalty. No degraded service.
If you opt out
You still get access to the Priors Bank for your own modelling runs. The only difference is that your engagement does not add new patterns to the pool. Your results are not degraded; the pool just does not grow from your work.
If you want to remove past contributions
Contact us. We will flag your contributor slot as opted out. Any aggregate that drops below five contributors as a result will automatically fall back to published industry benchmarks (Binet-Field, Nielsen, WARC).
5. The short version
| What | Who owns it |
|---|---|
| Your raw data (uploads, integrations, records) | You |
| Your deliverables (reports, model outputs) | You |
| Acera's engine code and model architecture | Acera |
| Acera's methodology and rulebooks | Acera |
| The Priors Bank (pooled, de-identified patterns) | Acera |
| Your specific contribution to the Priors Bank (if opted in) | De-identified and aggregated; not extractable |
6. Questions
If you want the full legal language, it is in the retainer agreement you signed. If you want to understand something specific about how your data is handled, email legal@aceralabs.com.au. We will give you a straight answer.