Do You Need A Digital Clean Room?

An Intro to Digital Clean Rooms

By: Lorena Bergan, Director Of Digital Ad Ops | Caryn Ferraro, Account Executive | Larissa Hopkins, Digital Media Supervisor

Everyone in the digital marketing world knows what a cookie is… no, not the delicious, sugary chocolate chip kind, but the kind commonly used online to target consumers by storing data on your browser in a small text file. Programmatic media platforms rely on cookies to track and collect online browsing behavior including shopping habits, articles read, travel planning, videos watched and other useful touchpoints. As delicious as these cookies and their crumbles of information are, a rise in privacy concerns means they’re currently being phased out. Enter: data clean rooms.

A data clean room is a secure way to link anonymous marketing and advertising data from many companies. They are spaces where multiple collaborators can safely share customer data and where ‘walled garden’ platforms like Facebook, Google and Amazon can share aggregated data with advertisers. This data is then paired with first-party data from the advertiser for comparison, enabling companies to add value to information they already own. The aggregated data does not leave the clean room, ensuring that consumer privacy is protected in line with all external regulations and internal policies.

Building a data clean room involves strategic collaboration between complementary organizations. For example, a tourist board, hotel chain and airline may decide it is mutually beneficial to share customer data. These companies all target the same customer but are not competitors, so they would benefit from sharing this anonymized data.

This technology isn’t new, so why the recent focus? That goes back to those tasty cookies and their crumbles of useful data being phased out as the industry embraces a privacy-first mindset. More than ever, data needs to be collected under lock and key. Data clean rooms are the vehicle for corporate partners and media companies to securely share data with key partners and advertisers while maintaining full control over how, for how long, and where that data can be used. Data clean rooms enable safe, secure analysis of data wherever it lives.

With privacy restrictions continuing to tighten, clean rooms are becoming more valuable to brands who are interested in high-quality data to make better, more informed business decisions and make their marketing more effective. A clean room enables both parties to have transparency and control over how the data is accessed and used while ensuring consumer privacy is protected. And, because that’s the way the cookie crumbles, data clean rooms will continue to rise in demand.

Photo Source: ClearCode