As the date for the death of third-party cookies draws ever closer, the industry invests more hope in solutions to fill the gap. Data clean rooms are one such solution.
Data clean rooms allow two parties to share and analyse data in a privacy-compliant way. They can broadly be categorised into two types; media clean rooms and partner clean rooms.
Media clean rooms are those within the walled gardens – these are commonly used by brands who spend a lot of their budget within these environments.
Meanwhile partner clean rooms allow two smaller parties to share data- for example, a publisher and an advertiser.
Data clean rooms have been touted as an essential tool in agencies’, brands’, and publishers’ belts for their post-cookie future. But are data clean rooms worth the hype?
One piece of the jigsaw
James Buckle is chief digital officer at PHD Global Business. He says that the buzz around data clean rooms is justified.
“Obviously you get a lot of buzz in our industry around certain types of solutions and technologies,” said Buckle. “But data clean rooms are a safe and privacy compliant way to be able to manage and transform data, in a way that allows you to address some of the technical challenges and limitations that operating in this space now presents to you as an advertiser.”
However, Paul Cuckoo, who is worldwide head of analytics at PHD, notes that data clean rooms are just one piece of the jigsaw.
“Data clean rooms are a crucial part of our post third-party cookie strategy. But that’s not to say they’re the only solution,” said Cuckoo, “Another thing we’re looking at could be summarised as browser-based tracking. Obviously Google Topics has recently been announced, and we’re quite excited about that as an opportunity. The other thing is looking at the potential of universal IDs.”
It’s not just agencies who are integrating clean rooms into their data strategy, but publishers too.
Camilla Child is director of commercial data strategy at Telegraph Media Group (TMG), which owns The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph. Child notes that TMG’s long standing focus on subscriptions have given it a head start when it comes to adapting to the post-cookie world.
“Thanks to the success of their subscription strategy, Telegraph Media Group (TMG) has not relied on third-party cookies for the past two years,” Child said, “They have a wealth of rich first-party data from logged-in readers and have invested heavily in tools, which helps brands move away from cookies to more accurately identify, model and target audiences.”
Child says that clean rooms help get the most out of this bank of first-party data.
“TMG has created its own data-matching initiative, Telegraph Unity, which is powered by InfoSum’s clean room technology. Unity represents a key pillar in TMG’s digital transformation, helping partners to unlock value from the direct relationships they have with their customers. The process is safe and secure as there is no sharing or co-mingling of data, and is proven to be 99.9 percent accurate,” Child added.
Frustrations around interoperability
No data solution is perfect, and clean rooms have their limitations too.
One of the key selling points of data clean rooms is that they’re privacy-focused, but this can present challenges in other areas.
“Almost by definition partner clean rooms are not interoperable,” said Cuckoo. “ I think this is where we really have to recall the core purpose of these cleanrooms, which is data privacy for the end user, these are not designed for you to be able to extract that ID-level data.”
“That said, we are starting to explore statistical and Bayesian processes to see if we can actually start to make some inferences across these data sets in a privacy safe way,” he added.
PHD’s Buckle says that while data clean rooms are generally accessible for businesses, it’s important to have in-house data specialists to get the most out of them.
“Data rooms aren’t brand new, they are accessible for advertisers. But I think what is important is having data skill sets within your business. Understanding what the value of this tool is, how you’re going to get that data into that ecosystem, and what you’re going to use it for, are all so important,” he said.
TMG’s Camilla Child says that her company’s partnership with InfoSum is so far delivering strong results for brands which are utilising it.
“One of the key benefits to brands using a data clean room is the opportunity to enrich their customer view with information around behaviours, preferences and intentions and to act on this with more distinct and creative campaign planning and messaging,” she said. “There is a huge opportunity for intelligent, data-led marketing in the post-cookie world. We are already seeing significant uplifts in consideration and action intent, far beyond standard digital benchmarks.”
“As a publisher who has taken the necessary steps to operate without third-party cookies, we would like to see more brands and their agencies embrace these types of data partnerships,” she said.
“Advertisers need to be ahead of the curve on this,” said PHD’s Buckle, “and at least evaluating what these solutions can bring to their business”.
Meanwhile Paul Cuckoo believes that on the brand side, the biggest companies are well placed to drive wider adoption.
“As a prediction, I think the weight of the world’s largest advertisers, the P&Gs and the Unilevers of the world is eventually going to force a greater cohesion around client specific clean rooms,” saidl Cuckoo.
