What are clean rooms? 

Clean rooms are a technological solution that allow advertisers, publishers, and retailers the ability to securely combine datasets in a privacy-friendly way. The data can be from a walled garden or be shared between two partners, while allowing each participant control and privacy of its data. In this secure and strongly protected environment, two parties are able to share and analyze data in a transparent setting without disclosing user-level data to one another. That first-party data is anonymized, layered, and matched with the aggregated data from the clean room provider. This data provided by clean rooms gives advertisers a deeper understanding of their audience segments and their behaviours while ensuring advertisers and publishers are operating ethically. 

Why should Canadian advertisers consider clean rooms? 

The future of digital marketing is now. With industry challenges related to the collection, storage, analysis, and sharing of consumer data (following increased privacy regulations and demise of third party identifiers) Canadian advertisers need to ensure that their ad efforts are effective, efficient and ethical. 

In addition to clean rooms being a solution to accurate, ethical audience targeting, they can also be used by advertisers who want to leverage first-party data to create new, strategic alliances that support better advertising decisions through improved data measurement in a privacy-first landscape. As a result, marketers will have a better understanding of their data segmentation, which may be shared with a publisher or an ad network to tactically support a campaign. 

How can Canadian advertisers take advantage of clean rooms? 

As consumer privacy continues to be a global priority, Canadian advertisers must be prepared to adjust their strategies to find success.

According to the IAB’s 2023 “State of Data,” report, nearly 50% of advertisers are currently using clean rooms for data anonymization and compliance. That said, less than a third reported leveraging them for measurement and attribution. Canadian advertisers should lean in to using clean rooms for measurement insights to ensure they’re taking advantage of the full scope of benefits clean rooms offer.

“The most scalable approach for Canadian advertisers to consider would be to leverage clean rooms for insights, provided that there’s a substantial enough match rate between the datasets being used and that the resulting sample size is substantial enough to be statistically significant,” says Saad Uddin, Co-Founder & CEO at Native Touch. He suggests that advertisers planning to take advantage of clean rooms in the future should start building their first party dataset and getting the appropriate permissions from consumers.

What’s next for clean rooms? 

Continued privacy legislation and industry regulations means that the industry will be seeing increased interest and investment in clean rooms. Advertisers will begin collaborating with key partners to accelerate the adoption curve of clean rooms across use cases outside of marketing. “For clean rooms to become critical in a marketer’s tool belt, advertisers will need to onboard more players, both publishers and advertisers, and build out products that will help marketers both scale their targeting and generate deep insights about their consumers,” says Saad. This strategy allows businesses to combine data, create engaged audiences, and adopt lucrative partnership opportunities. 

Clean rooms are in the early stages and the full scope of capabilities have yet to be revealed. Reach out to a Native Touch sales representative to find out how we’re helping our clients adapt – and thrive – in the evolving advertising landscape by leveraging key tools and innovative technologies to find success.