• by Ray Schultz , August 31, 2023

Publishers seeking to balance privacy with the targeting needs of advertisers may have a solution at hand: Data clean rooms, safe zones for analyzing first-party data while protecting consumers’ identities.  

They are not really rooms. Rather, they are a technological means to support data collaboration between publishers and advertisers, judging by Data Collaboration for Media Owners, a white paper by Optable. 

And they are hardly a new idea — Google, Facebook and Amazon were first to try them. But the concept is gaining traction among publishers and advertisers in general despite many challenges.   

A recent IAB/Ipsos survey identified these hurdles, starting with proving ROI: 

• Leveraging results/growing ROI — 52% 
• Data interoperability/customization — 39% 
• Internal resource challenges — 38% 
• Privacy — 32%
• Data Quality — 21% 
• Economic and competitive pressure — 9%

Optable also lists these obstacles to data collaboration:

1. Lack of interoperability — The study explains that while these systems are “good at collecting, cleaning, and normalizing a publisher’s first-party data, collaborators must use the same system to safely share data. Given the number of solution options, it’s certain that at least some of a publisher’s key advertising partners are using different systems.” The solution: A “data collaboration solution that is technology-agnostic and works across platforms.”
2. Fragmentation — This problem “hampers publishers’ ability to resolve user identities, produce holistic insights, and build precise and actionable audiences for their advertising partners,” the paper continues. The solution: “Media owners need a better way to end data fragmentation and make it easy to harness the power of their data within their advertising businesses.”
3. Not intuitive for business users — The paper contends that “Ad Sales and AdOps teams are on the front lines of customer interaction, but they are not equipped to write the complex queries that generate custom audiences or insights. That task falls to expert data scientists in a different part of the organization.” The solution: “Empowering business users with intuitive data collaboration solutions.”

Optable argues that data collaboration produces these benefits:

• Greater, more predictable revenue 
• Larger share of the ad market and reduced technology costs
• Increased profit through operation efficiency

But it takes a willingness to go beyond data warehouses, customer data platforms and data management platforms.  

These tools have been “instrumental in allowing publishers to develop unique ad products with their owned, first-party audience data,” the study notes. “Yet, they are not a cure-all and aren’t designed for a future in which media companies share data directly with their advertising partners for secure collaboration and analysis.”