A data clean room is a privacy-safe database where companies match their first-party data with aggregated data from third-party sources.
A data clean room can be a valuable tool for brands, publishers, and platforms to use their first-party data better.
In a landscape where data is increasingly essential for targeting and attribution, clean rooms support more robust brand marketing strategies. They also help marketers overcome privacy challenges and speed up their marketing prowess.
What is a Data Clean Room?
A data clean room is an encrypted and secure environment where first-party user-level data is stored in a privacy-compliant manner. This data can be used for various purposes, including targeting and personalization, frequency capping, measurement, and attribution.
These environments can be created by media platforms, brands, and even content owners. They are an effective tool for helping advertisers and platforms to meet privacy regulations.
However, they can also be a challenge for marketers. According to Gartner, 80% of advertisers with over $1 billion media budgets will use clean data rooms by 2023.
One solution is to partner with a clean room provider to create a safe data-sharing space. Then, the partners can apply strict controls to their data and avoid leaking valuable targeting segments that could be valuable for rivals.
Another option is to build your own data clean room. This can be a good choice for a brand with large amounts of first-party user data but isn’t yet ready to share it.
This is a mid to long-term strategy, so choosing the right partner for your business needs is essential. Ensure you work with a clean room provider with the experience and expertise to help your company. This will help ensure your data is safe and compliant with the latest privacy rules.
How Does a Data Clean Room Work?
A data clean room is a secure environment that allows multiple companies, or divisions of a single company, to bring data together for joint analysis under defined guidelines and restrictions. This helps ensure that data is used in a way that aligns with various industry, state, and federal data regulations.
An everyday use case for a data clean room is a user-level analysis of customers across a range of metrics. These can be combined with transactional and historical data to give a complete picture of a user’s relationship with your organization, even over multiple interactions.
Another famous use case is attribution, where data clean rooms provide an efficient way to ensure users get the right messages at the right time. This can be important for brands trying to build better loyalty programs or provide the best digital experiences for their customers.
As the world becomes increasingly data-driven, marketers seek new ways to optimize ad spend, create better loyalty programs, and deliver the best digital experiences by building direct customer relationships. To meet this need, they are shifting towards first-party data strategies and embracing data clean rooms as a tool to help them solve these challenges.
Why is a Data Clean Room Important?
A data clean room is a privacy-friendly solution for marketers who want to improve their attribution models and ad targeting. It allows them to combine first-party user-level data with aggregated data from third-party sources without revealing personally identifiable information (PII).
Data clean rooms are especially beneficial to media companies and advertisers who may need to share sensitive data, such as a brand or retailer sharing user loyalty data with a publisher. With the security and access controls a data clean room provides, the two parties can securely share and analyze this data while adhering to all applicable regulatory and privacy laws.
The early adopters of clean rooms have come from highly regulated sectors, such as financial services and healthcare. Still, any industry can benefit from the capabilities of distributed data clean rooms. For example, healthcare providers can use remote patient monitoring, wearables, and other data to develop personalized care models that reduce costs while improving the overall experience for patients.
As regulations evolve, accessing more relevant data is crucial for brands to thrive in an increasingly competitive digital landscape. As a result, the demand for a privacy-friendly, collaborative approach to data has never been higher.
What are the Benefits of a Data Clean Room?
A data clean room is a privacy-safe, secure environment where marketers and brands can share data to optimize ad performance. This helps advertisers reach their target audience, measure the effectiveness of ad campaigns, and attribute impressions to conversions.
As a result, data clean rooms have emerged as one of the most popular ways for brands to manage their advertising processes. Powerful advertising platforms use them to match user-level data from their platform with first-party data from brands and publishers.
While these tools promise to ensure advertisers can reach their audiences, they can also be vulnerable to privacy concerns. To ensure that data clean rooms remain safe, they must be managed using advanced privacy techniques like encryption, hashing, and other technologies.
Brands can use clean data rooms to analyze user-level and cross-channel data. This can help companies determine how valuable a particular customer is over time and how they can optimize their messaging to drive re-engagement.
Brands can also use a clean room to securely share data with partners, such as measurement providers or media/publisher platforms. This is done by hashing the PII data sent to the clean room and then sending it back to the partner in an anonymized format.