Clean rooms are the ad tech industry’s answer to data privacy concerns while parading the idea of interoperability. Or is it the answer to interoperability while parading privacy?
While ad tech figures that out, the broadcast industry is putting clean room tech to work.
Compared with the rest of the digital ad ecosystem, “TV is a totally different beast,” Nancy Marzouk, CEO of identity resolution provider MediaWallah, told AdExchanger at CES in Las Vegas last week.
TV publishers are jumping on the clean room trend because it’s a potential way to do privacy-safe audience matching at scale. Ad tech and data-driven media companies need to retain that value while mitigating marketer woes around media fragmentation.
The “cruel irony” about clean rooms is that they can actually mean less interoperability, not more, said Justin Rosen, SVP of data and analytics at Ampersand, on a panel at CES. “Clean rooms themselves may represent another form of fragmentation.”
Is it operable?
The main problem with clean rooms – at least the ones currently in market – is that brands can only use them to scale an audience against a particular publisher.
An audience ID targeted by NBCUniversal’s clean room, for example, can’t be reconciled to that same user or household in Disney’s clean room or Ampersand’s clean room. The marketer has one campaign that spans all those broadcasters and would prefer to set one frequency cap. But each network could stay below its cap, and the viewer still feels bombarded.
“Interoperability is a word that gets thrown around a lot,” Marzouk said, “but companies are doing everything they can from a tech standpoint to make sure their data stays in one place.”
Protectiveness over first-party data isn’t unique to clean rooms – most publishers see their data as a competitive edge. At the same time, though, the idea of interoperability is the selling point of clean rooms (other than privacy).
“I don’t know that there will ever be true cross-clean-room interoperability, because it’s not everyone’s incentive,” said Jason Manningham, CEO of Blockgraph, also speaking on stage at CES. “Interesting bedfellows” would have to work together to make that happen, he added.
But for TV advertisers, interoperability is an urgent need because measurement (i.e., the traditional ratings system) is a straight-up mess.
“Clean rooms won’t be interoperable, and TV advertisers will still need to figure out cross-platform measurement,” Marzouk told AdExchanger. To do that, she said, “buyers will likely start working with clean tech partners and may even want to start making their own clean rooms.”
Cleaning up
Still, building out a data clean room doesn’t happen overnight.
Enter “clean technology.”
“Clean tech,” Marzouk said, is cloud-based software that houses data and keeps it encrypted and anonymized while accessed by multiple parties (think Snowflake, AWS or Microsoft Azure).
The idea of clean tech is to act as a “privacy protective pipeline” that strips personal identifiable information from first-party data sets so that matches can be shared between clean rooms, said Blockgraph’s Manningham.
Clean rooms are built from this infrastructure but have their own platform-specific IDs, rules and permissions baked into their solutions, which is why they aren’t cross-compatible.
“Not everything is a clean room – there’s a big distinction between clean rooms and clean tech,” Marzouk told AdExchanger. “Think of clean rooms as the managed service of clean tech.”
And, ideally, clean tech can be used to bolster the effectiveness of clean rooms.
Clean rooms are just the first step to interoperability, Marzouk said. And more buy-side adoption of clean tech could help bridge the gap between clean room silos.
If an advertiser has a low match rate with a publisher’s audience data in a clean room, for example, it might enlist cloud-based software partners to run queries across other cloud-based data sets using privacy-enhancing technology, like multiparty computation. This “cross-cloud querying” can increase the fidelity of advertisers’ data, said Adam Paul, managing director of media alliances at LiveRamp, also at CES.
In other words, clean tech can help buyers pull in additional data to increase clean room match rates, Marzouk told AdExchanger. This should help back up some identity data points that are critical to TV advertising but may not exist much longer (cough … IP addresses).
Clean tech adoption could help foster more data partnerships beyond the big broadcasters and biggest brands.
It’s possible that marketers who build their own clean rooms will insist publishers use the tech for audience matching if they want their ad dollars, Marzouk said. That way advertisers can plan and measure their TV buys across multiple programmers instead of going out to media companies, each like a mini walled garden.
Generally speaking, clean room adoption from the demand side saw a rapid uptick last year, as advertisers broadened their reach and fought frequency capping issues.
But this year, Manningham said, those first iterations of clean rooms on the market are going to get a lot smarter.
