Call it the baby boom of clean rooms.
On Tuesday, Paramount announced a clean room integration with Havas Media Group using LiveRamp’s data collaboration software.
Because the software is cloud-based, it can plug into other related technology that clients may already be using, such as Snowflake.
This lets companies keep their data in one place rather than the more traditional approach of onboarding data to multiple platforms, which takes time and could result in data leakage and privacy issues.
The only way to take full advantage of the potential of clean rooms is if there’s interoperability across the industry, said Travis Scoles, SVP of advanced advertising at Paramount.
Many media companies have their own clean rooms, including NBCUniversal, Disney and Roku, but not all of them give advertisers information about how their campaigns are doing on other programmers’ platforms.
Paramount hopes that by pitching an efficient and privacy-safe way to make audience and viewing data more widely available without revealing sensitive information, it will be able to attract both agencies and other media companies.
Head in the clouds
Paramount already uses Snowflake, and, up until now, Scoles said, there were a lot of hoops to jump through when matching data with a company using different data-sharing technology.
Paramount and Havas previously each had to send their first-party data between Snowflake and LiveRamp, which Havas uses, before that data could be matched.
But that model is “prohibitive” to interoperability, Scoles said, because companies feel more comfortable keeping their data in one place.
Through the integration with LiveRamp’s cloud-based data clean room, companies can match data through whichever cloud service they’re already using (think Snowflake or AWS) without having to download any software, said Davis Wilkinson, lead product manager of federation and data collaboration at LiveRamp.
This also means clients can access Paramount’s clean room infrastructure even if they don’t work with LiveRamp. Paramount itself wasn’t using LiveRamp’s clean room tech – it primarily uses Snowflake’s – but integrating into multiple cloud platforms could help bring in more advertisers who want to buy and measure campaigns without having to move data around.
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Paramount is not the first company to call for cloud-based technology to make secure data sharing easier and clean rooms more interoperable.
Havas Media has been piloting its Paramount clean room integration with several advertiser clients and is seeing improved reach and frequency deduplication between audiences watching on Paramount’s linear channels versus streaming properties, said Ram Padmanabhan, a managing partner in the consumer science and analytics division at Havas.
In addition to agencies, Paramount also hopes to woo competing media companies to use its clean room in the spirit of collaboration. Broadcasters already joined hands with their direct competitors to form a joint industry committee (JIC) for the purpose of creating measurement currency standards, so doing the same for data could be the missing puzzle piece.
Besides, interoperability doesn’t have to come at the expense of sacrificing a competitive advantage, Scoles said, referring to the reason why programmers typically withhold data from each other.
Programmers (and agencies) wouldn’t be pooling or sharing their data with their rivals, Scoles said. If another agency wants to use Paramount’s clean room, for example, it wouldn’t have access to data from Havas clients.
So, what would be in it for other programmers?
The same benefit they get from participating in OpenAP, Scoles said, referencing the data activation platform that powers the JIC. After all, offering better transparency and data integrations is also a competitive advantage.
Scoles said Paramount hasn’t yet had talks with other media companies about using its clean room, but the shift toward interoperability is in the air.
Soon, Scoles added, the TV space will be divided into “those who run walled gardens and those who don’t.”
