Understanding the Transformative Impact of Data Clean Rooms

Advertisers today are faced with so many challenges when it comes to reaching the right target audiences and knowing if you’re spending media money in the right places. With signal loss and the growing importance of your first party data, being able to build audiences, measure campaign effectiveness, and retarget is incredibly important. And you need to be able to do all of it in a way that still delivers the reach and lift you’re counting on.?

Clean rooms are a methodology to bring that to life.

Simply put, clean rooms are safe and neutral spaces for data collaboration and partnerships to exist without either party (or parties) having access to the other’s data.?

Clean rooms a powerful tool, when they’re used the right way. Too often though, marketers think of clean rooms as a catch-all, spinning up a clean room and looking for a problem to solve.

But that’s the wrong way to do it. Instead, they should be looking for the problems they need to solve, then utilize clean room capabilities to do the heavy lifting.

So, what are some of the problems that clean rooms solve (and don’t solve)? Here are a few ideas to get you started:

Walled Garden Measurement for More Efficient Ad Spend

Companies spend millions of dollars a year advertising on platforms like YouTube, Amazon Ads, Facebook, TikTok, and other social channels. The ad-tech industry calls these “walled gardens” - closed platforms or ecosystems where the provider has control over content, applications, and importantly for marketers, media and advertisement data.?

Platform providers often put significant requirements on the usage and movement of media data, which leaves advertisers unable to accurately measure the performance of their media and the effectiveness of their ad spend on those platforms.

Clean rooms solve that problem by enabling each party to preserve their data and consumer privacy while still providing access to the data insights that enable a marketer to more effectively measure their spend.

Growing Your Media Network wIth Better Insights

Clean rooms can dramatically improve the effectiveness of your media network. Measurement is a critical component of how quickly you can grow your media network. Without the right performance insights, you may not be able attract the media partners you're looking for.

Take a company like Walmart for instance who has a robust media network. They may have a tricky time selling media to use on TikTok, unless the advertiser knows that the media and audience they're spending on has an effective campaign.

To solve that problem, Walmart is using clean room technology to give advertisers the measurement insights they need, resulting in greater confidence to increase their media spend in these channels.

Fueling Advancements Beyond Advertising

Clean rooms are pushing innovation well beyond advertising into business operations, management, and beyond.

General enterprise analytics can be leveraged for an incredible number of use cases. For example, a CPG brand that needs to have a better understanding of inventory allocation, or a supply chain manager that needs to identify the most efficient location to ship from.

Clean rooms allow businesses to gain insights from a wide array of collaborators such as retailers and distribution channels in order to make data-proven decisions about their operations.

One of the most exciting evolutions on the horizon will be to watch how clean rooms open up new markets for data collaboration in industries like financial services and healthcare.?

There are so many important data requirements in the financial services space when it comes to data privacy and movement. Clean room technology enables companies to keep data within their walls and be compliant with regulations.

In healthcare, where patient data privacy is critical, data clean rooms could be used to analyze medical records, in a privacy-centric way, for research and drug development. A data clean room could be set up to provide researchers and pharmaceutical companies access to pseudonymized medical data in a way that ensures patient privacy and compliance with data regulations.

At the end of the day, data clean rooms are powerful tools that remove the discussions of trust and privacy, and instead focus on powerful-relationships between parties to unlock new insights and improve their operations and decision-making. At the same time, they're fostering personalized experiences with their customers that can be measured and increasingly improved for higher return.