Amazon’s cloud computing division Amazon Web Services (AWS) has unveiled an overhauled ad offering, AWS for Advertising and Marketing, which brings together new and existing features geared towards advertising from AWS and a number of major partners. One of the stars of this new initiative is AWS Clean Rooms which, as the name suggests, is a new clean room solution designed to allow multiple different companies in the digital advertiser space match up their datasets in a privacy-safe manner.
AWS for Advertising and Marketing will cover five distinct areas: audience and customer data management, privacy-enhanced data collaboration, ad intelligence and measurement, ad platforms, and digital customer experience. Access to relevant AWS tools and partnered companies’ capabilities will be available within these categories, which Amazon says “simplifies the process for industry customers to select the right tools and partners in each area, helping them to accelerate their production launches and see faster time to value”.
Companies partnered with AWS on the new initiative include Adobe, Aerospike, Amperity, Databricks, Experian, LiveRamp, Neustar, Salesforce, and Snowflake.
Custom clean rooms
Within AWS for Advertising and Marketing, AWS Clean Rooms is the first major new tool to be added.
Amazon already runs a clean room within its Amazon Advertising division, called Amazon Marketing Cloud, but this is an advertiser-facing offering which allows buyers to match up their own data with Amazon’s. AWS Clean Rooms meanwhile can be used by any business to create their own clean room – meaning a media owner could create a clean room using the tool, allowing them to then match their own data against their advertising partners. They can then set limits on what their partners are able to access, and what sorts of queries they’re allowed to run.
Amazon says customers will be able to set up their own clean rooms “in minutes”, and that they’ll be able to use data which already lives in AWS within those clean rooms. That’s a significant advantage given AWS’ popularity, as it cuts out the need to move vast banks of data onto a new platform.
The new solution will be released for preview “in a few weeks” according to Amazon.
AWS Clean Rooms will sit within the ‘privacy enhanced collaboration’ section of AWS for Advertising and Marketing, which will also host solutions for identity and transcoding. These include Unified ID 2.0 on AWS, which will help customers deploy UID2 operator services, and LiveRamp Embedded Transcoder on AWS, which Amazon says will make it safer and easier for companies to deploy LiveRamp identity services into their Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) while maintaining control of their data.
