Can anyone beyond the Big Tech giants win in the clean room category?
That’s not a yes-no question, says Adam Solomon, global head of business development and go-to-market for AWS Clean Rooms and AWS Entity Resolution, on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks.
The answer is more nuanced, he says, and depends on where a company is “in the stack.”
The goal of Amazon Web Services (AWS) is to provide privacy-enhancing technologies, like data clean rooms, for other companies to build upon – including data clean room companies.
Habu, for example, which LiveRamp acquired for $200 million last week, is an AWS customer and partner that built its technology on Amazon’s cloud. (LiveRamp is also an AWS customer.)
AWS sees itself not as a competitor of data clean room providers like Habu, InfoSum and Optable but as a cloud-based facilitator of what they offer – the secure sharing and analysis of data between advertisers, media and tech companies without having to move the data between platforms.
These companies “operate at an application layer,” Solomon says.
“We have capabilities that can enhance their offerings,” he says, “whether you’re a conventional clean room company or you’re an ad tech, a mar tech or a media platform that wants to add those capabilities to your own platform and services.”
Guess there are no competitors in ad tech, only frenemies.
Also in this episode: Why AWS got into the ad tech and mar tech business, why first-party data isn’t “enough” for marketers, why AWS calls its identity resolution-style product “entity resolution” and how Solomon became an ad tech inventor. (He’s got the patents to prove it.)
For more articles featuring Adam Solomon, click here.
