Data clean rooms have come a long way since walled gardens such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon first introduced them as a way of working with advertisers without risking the exposure of their valuable customer data.
Today, brands across all industries are taking advantage of the logic created in these early iterations to enable safe data collaboration in cloud-based clean rooms, and are transforming their marketing strategies for the privacy-first era. By securely sharing data with partners and platforms, in a trusted neutral zone, without ever revealing personally identifiable information (PII), brands can use the latest clean room environments to understand their customers and prospects like never before.
Brands can use shared insight to identify high-value customer segments, or perhaps lapsing customers, enabling them to deliver more relevant marketing experiences. They can use richer data insight to power activation, measurement, and optimization. And they can take advantage of co-marketing, loyalty, and prospecting opportunities with their trusted partners.
While this outlines examples of what brands can do with a clean room, it doesn’t explain why brands need one. That is a question with multiple answers.
1. Genuinely ethical marketing
When we talk to our clients, one thing that’s becoming crystal clear is that brands genuinely want to use data in a way that’s ethical and respects customers’ preferences.
Adopting a data clean room isn’t just about complying with evolving data privacy regulations, though that remains a critical focus area for brands. A data clean room enables brands to put the customer at the heart of their marketing strategies while honoring the customer’s personal data rights and expectations. It allows them to use data to better understand customers, while fulfilling their ethical responsibility to only use information in ways authorized by those customers. As people become increasingly aware of the value of their personal information, truly ethical data use helps brands build strong and trusting customer relationships.
2. Answering cookie deprecation
Third-party cookies were never designed to help brands understand their customers, or deliver relevant, personalized experiences. But somehow we’ve ended up relying on them to do just that.
As the deprecation of third-party cookies progresses, most marketers appreciate they’re going to need to lean more heavily into first-party data for customer understanding, audience reach, and measurement. And data clean rooms are a critical tool in this effort.
For some brands, clean rooms will be used to safely combine their own customer data with that of a carefully chosen partner (or partners) to derive valuable insights and discover potential new audiences. For others that don’t have the luxury of first party data – and CPG brands are a great example – clean rooms can be used to co-create offers with partner brands that do. Either way, high-quality third-party data can be added to ethically enrich data within clean rooms with behavioral and interest attributes.
3. Keeping control of data
Data sovereignty is of the utmost importance, and brands must maintain full control over what happens to their data.
A cloud-based data clean room provides a central zone where a brand’s partners or selected providers can access and work with certain elements of their data, without physically moving it out of the brand’s own environment. There’s no need for data transfers – the brand can simply expose the tables, rows, or attributes their partner needs access to into the safe clean room environment, with full governance controls, and then disable sharing when the work is done.
Brands can keep track of who they share data with, what permissions are attached to that data, and what types of queries can be run. They can even timestamp every interaction to assist data audits and risk mitigation.
When simplicity hides complexity
The premise of cloud-based data clean rooms is a simple one. It provides a safe space where partners can share valuable data without exposing PII or losing control of that data. But the simplicity of the concept can sometimes mask the complexity of the execution, leading some brands to try to set up their own clean room, rather than using an experienced third-party provider.
Acxiom’s clean room solution is powered by Snowflake – our critical platform partner. And our decision to build on top of that platform was informed by around five years of rigorous testing and development, where Snowflake outperformed other technologies time and time again in both security and performance.
But even with the exceptional foundation of the Snowflake platform, Acxiom layers incredible value-added technology on top. We’re adding our privacy-by-design core platform to be absolutely certain the solution can meet all the requirements of the regulated industries we serve. We’re wrapping all our data offerings, from data hygiene and completion, to identity graphs, to third-party data sets, so they can be used within the clean room environment. And we’re making sure each individual implementation is thoroughly quality controlled and tested.
Brands that hope to simply take the technology from Snowflake (or AWS, or Databricks), obfuscate some data, and start sharing may be in for a surprise. Creating an effective, secure, cloud-based clean room on top of leading platform technology still requires a great deal of work and experience, and involves a lot of risk. Most brands can’t justify the necessary resources and those that do are usually better off using them to develop great products for their customers.
Data clean rooms are the future
As more brands embrace genuinely ethical marketing, as the cookie continues to deprecate, and as data sovereignty becomes ever more vital, data clean rooms will become essential for all brands. They’ll provide a tool for brands to get to know their customers and deliver exceptional experiences in a rapidly changing environment.
Clean rooms will continue to evolve, with machine learning and other technological developments making them ever more powerful. And they’ll start to scale, with almost limitless partners able to collaborate in the same space. We often talk about building trust between the brand and customers, but today’s data clean rooms also help build strong trusting relationships between brand partners that enable the collaboration needed to survive and thrive.
