• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, June 14, 2023

In a deal with cloud-based data-management platform Snowflake, Nielsen this morning rolled out what it describes as a "media data room" (MDR) enabling clients to access a "census of first-party data" that can be matched to Nielsen's media audience attributes.

"It is a step towards building a true clean room, which will allow data to flow both into and out of the Nielsen ecosystem," a Nielsen spokesman explains, adding: "This media data room will enable the sharing of measurement data/analytics out to clients in a more efficient, cloud-based way than is being done currently."

The move comes as clean rooms enabling marketers to append their own first-party data to a wide variety of third-party databases -- or in some cases, other marketers' first-party ones -- in secure, privacy compliant ways that don't risk leaking proprietary information.

The initial data set available in Nielsen's new room will be Nielsen's respondent-level data, which is a modeled, representative sub-sample of its 35 million household national linear TV audience-measurement sample.

Nielsen said the data set will enable clients to easily access and query the data for "near real-time insights."

Nielsen described this as an initial phase of a technology build out that would lead to a true data clean room enabling two-way data-sharing between clients and Nielsen, but did not indicate what the timeframe for that might ultimately be.