Samooha has its head in (and eye on) the clouds.
Over the past two weeks, the data collaboration startup announced integrations with two different walled garden clean rooms: Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) in mid-September followed by Google’s Ads Data Hub (ADH) through a partnership with Media.Monks on Wednesday.
Samooha, which launched earlier this year with backing from data cloud company Snowflake, is developing machine-learning-based technology to help marketers use clean rooms – regardless of whether they have a data science background.
The purpose of the integrations with ADH and AMC is to give the advertisers and publishers that use walled garden clean rooms a way to analyze and benchmark their first-party data across multiple media channels, said Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan, the startup’s CEO and co-founder.
There’s a need for this service, she said, because the walled gardens don’t make it easy to compare insights outside of their own environments, and that’s by design.
Never promised you a rose garden …
There are two broad categories of clean rooms in this world: independent and walled garden.
Independent clean room vendors (think Habu, InfoSum and Optable) want to be as interoperable as possible.
But the data collaboration tools offered by Google, Amazon and Meta are, by definition, not interoperable. These platforms only provide insights and enable data collaboration for media bought within their own closed ecosystems.
They’re not called walled gardens for nothing.
“But what brands and sellers need is a unified environment where they can benchmark and compare performance by looking at how those silos look side by side with non-walled garden clean rooms,” Sivaramakrishnan said.
Although Samooha can’t provide a full view of the customer journey across walled gardens – “that’s an unanswerable question right now,” Sivaramakrishnan said – Samooha’s ADH and AMC integrations allow buyers and sellers to at least see aggregated insights from Google and Amazon alongside insights from other data sources.
“It’s like a clean room of clean rooms,” Sivaramakrishnan said. “I believe that there will always be multiple walled garden clean rooms, which is why marketers need a strategy like this to manage their first-party data and collaborate with their partners.”
(Clean) room for more
But Samooha also has its eye on supporting data collaboration and activation in industries beyond advertising and marketing.
Last week, Samooha struck a partnership with Datavant, a health data company founded in 2017 by former LiveRamp CEO Travis May that helps health care organizations de-identify and tokenize patient records.
Whether it’s health care, financial service, retail, life sciences or entertainment, the fundamental need is the same: Make a company’s first-party data as valuable as possible by filling in the gaps.
For a brand marketer, that might mean using a clean room to match audiences with a publisher partner to measure a campaign, whereas a health care company might use a clean room to analyze sensitive health data for research purposes.
But the goal in both cases is to enrich first-party data and run secure data analysis.
“Whether we’re talking about publishers or pharma companies or a hospital system, they all need to manage their first-party data,” Sivaramakrishnan said. “Advertising and marketing are both powerful workflows, but clean rooms really are industry-agnostic.”
