Data clean rooms are attracting a lot of buzz lately. They’re pitched as a perfect solution in a data deprecation world: Brands can collaborate and maximize the value of their first-party data by running sophisticated analytics to understand customer behaviors, shopper journeys, and more. And thanks to privacy-preserving technologies, brands don’t need to expose customers’ personal information in the process.
But the market has grown so quickly that it’s creating confusion. Some marketers are asking me, “What’s the fuss? Clean rooms aren’t new.” And they’re right — in a Q2 2024 survey, 87% of B2C marketers said they use a data clean room today for marketing use cases. New vendors and new use cases have expanded the landscape, so much so that it mirrors the customer data platform (CDP) market in 2018. “Data clean room” has become an umbrella term encompassing technologies that serve different purposes.
Marketers Can Choose From Two Types Of Clean Rooms
Of course, the first step when considering a data clean room is to define your use case and end goals. From there, the market splits into two distinct categories:
- Walled gardens. Walled gardens offer a data clean room as a means for marketers to access granular measurement data. This includes Google Ads Data Hub and advertising partners like Pinterest, Disney, and NBCU. They argue that the data clean room lets them protect customers’ data while giving advertisers the insights they need to measure ROAS and optimize performance.
- Collaboration platforms. This category supports two or more partners collaborating on equal footing for mutual benefit, like identifying comarketing opportunities. These platforms can also support collaboration across different partner types, like brand-brand, brand-agency, or brand-publisher collaborations. Cloud data warehouses such as Snowflake, AWS, and Google Cloud Platform offer data clean rooms, and many applications and services layer their own capabilities on top of those solutions.
I’ll be working on a landscape report on data clean rooms later this year. If you’re a marketer trying to navigate the landscape, set up a guidance session for a deeper dive into what to look for and how to build a shortlist. If you’re a data clean room provider and want to be considered for the landscape, please reach out.
