Why Smart Data Collaboration (and Data Clean Rooms) Will Be Key to Marketers’ Success in 2023

By Vihan Sharma, EVP Global Sales, LiveRamp

For years marketers have aspired to achieve the coveted 360-degree view of their customers. In reality, no company is an island, and this sort of holistic view is challenging for any single business to achieve with only its own resources. No single company can understand a customer’s every touch point, especially those that take place outside the four walls of its business.

This is why increased engagement with partners, specifically via data collaboration, is becoming an essential element of the marketer’s playbook. For example, take the explosion of retail media networks in recent years, which have skyrocketed in popularity with companies seeking increased audience monetization and measurement. When brands can combine rich customer data with their trusted partners, they unlock combined data insights that can be used to optimise product offerings, run advanced analytics, or build more targeted campaigns.

Keeping it clean

One of the fastest-growing areas of data collaboration are data clean rooms, which allow companies to collaborate select data sets with trusted partners to unlock the 360-view of consumers that marketers desire.

These safe and neutral spaces exist without either party (or parties) gaining access to the other’s Directly Identifiable Customer Personal Information. With built-in privacy and security protections, clean rooms increase the trust index between parties to drive better outcomes, unlocking the ability for marketers to personalise the customer experience, enhance lifetime customer value, and acquire new customers. In turn, businesses can generate new revenue streams, optimise media spend, and improve measurement.

In the year ahead, we’ll continue to see clean rooms rise in the form of retail media networks, which allow retailers to monetise audiences and improve measurement, and enable suppliers, which are often first-party data poor, to build audiences. Moving forward, clean rooms will expand into other data-rich verticals like travel, as well as privacy-conscious industries such as healthcare and financial services. Publishing and TV are two additional areas where data collaboration will also gain footing thanks to clean rooms’ granular privacy controls that mitigate risk of unauthorised data access or use. Through tighter collaboration with brands and agencies, the marketers who work with media companies will vastly improve their campaign planning and measurement process.

Additionally, as more brands, retailers and media players rely on the cloud to power their marketing activities, clean rooms will only grow in necessity. The most advantageous clean rooms will be agnostic and offer an interoperable environment to engage any partner, wherever a company’s data lives – be that within or across clouds.

Meeting the needs of modern marketing

As the advertising industry navigates business pressures fueled by economic uncertainty, ever-expanding privacy legislation, cookie deprecation, and evolving consumer expectations, the move toward data collaboration unlocks a plethora of welcome opportunities for marketers to advance business outcomes.

Clean rooms tackle these challenges head on. With inherent privacy protections and superior measurement capabilities, these environments ensure data legislation compliance while offering a much more accurate, controlled and accountable alternative to third-party cookies. Clean rooms also enable companies to fulfil the promise of a value exchange with their customers, who increasingly require personalisation and transparency in order to maintain a relationship with the brands they engage with.

Following the rise of first-party data strategies, the industry’s next opportunity is to create a flywheel between buy- and sell-side partners to enhance 360-degree customer intelligence. With collaborative insights made possible through data collaboration and clean rooms, marketers will be well on their way to accelerating business transformation in 2023 and beyond.