Roku Is The New Player: A Look At Its Data Clean Room Strategy
Not to be left out, Roku this week dove into the data clean room. It will offer brands and agencies a way to collaborate with them using encrypted first-party data. The concept — built for streaming television — is intended to make planning and measuring campaigns easier without the use of cookies. With agency partners, Omnicom Media Group, Horizon Media, and Dentsu, the streaming TV platform announced the launch of its proprietary clean room offering. The product is based on Snowflake’s media and ad tech cloud data infrastructure.
A clean room is a place where publishers, platforms, and brands can safely and securely share first-party data in a way that can improve advertising effectiveness while still exerting strict controls over user privacy.
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Purpose-built for TV streaming
Roku’s clean room is purpose-built for TV streaming. The planning and measurement capabilities make it the only clean room to use audience data and linear TV data from direct consumer relationships on Roku, America’s No. 1 TV streaming platform.
The company explained in the press release to start with, an advertiser loads their data into a secure environment. Roku’s data clean room creates a secure connection between Roku data and the advertiser’s data. This enables brands to match their own data to Roku’s without sharing or exposing any personally identifiable information, all while protecting Roku users from direct identification. Advertisers can then query matched data and run their analysis within Roku’s clean room to understand potential campaign reach, current audience delivery, and advertising impact on product sales and sign-ups. OneView is also directly integrated with Roku’s clean room. Roku’s omnichannel demand-side platform (DSP) allows them to reach their audience across CTV, display, and mobile.
A look into Roku’s clean room
For instance, Foursquare, a leading location technology platform is a measurement and data partner for Roku’s clean room. The brands can better personalize and attribute their ad campaigns in OneView across devices and platforms.
The company’s first-party location data could be combined with Roku’s to target households in a certain area watching lifestyle and food programs or have people between the ages of 20 and 40 living there. Foursquare will provide the mobile location, but Roku can give behavioral and basic demographic information.
With a clean room, it is possible to match Roku-to-Foursquare audiences, but complex tracking can be layered into the campaign as well. Advertisers can use Roku data and Foursquare data to hone in on an anonymized audience segment in an area that meets their target requirements, then target that segment on Roku.
However, that is a one-time action item. If the advertiser wants to repeat the same activity a year after then it will have to resync the data as well as create a new list for a similar but distinct segment. On the contrary, in a clean room environment, the same type of audiences can be tracked over the years to understand sales and conversions. They can also determine what kind of streaming content causes transactions. This is advantageous for advertisers because a typical Roku ad purchase cannot be segmented based on the content viewed.
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Roku jumping on the bandwagon
The timing is not by chance. During the TV upfronts next month, Roku plans to test out several new services, including its clean room, with major advertisers. In a soon-to-be cookie-less world, data clean rooms are crucial to measuring advertising effectively. Louqman Parampath, VP of Product Management, Roku which has 60 million active accounts said,
The future of TV advertising won’t rely on fragile cookies or consortiums, but on direct connection with actual consumers. We are thrilled to help marketers accelerate their shift to TV streaming by putting privacy and transparency first.
He also added that cleanrooms are in the early stages, but are actively running campaigns.
We believe over time this will be the way first-party data will be used for connected TV.
Although the clean room isn’t a Nielsen alternative – advertisers and broadcasters are experimenting with alternate currencies and methods for measuring TV campaigns. It is perfectly positioned to fit into the trend of new TV attribution models.
Interesting Read: Disney Launches Clean Room For Marketers’ First-Party Data Needs
Clean Rooms Explained: How Marketers Can Prepare For Cookieless World
The advertising industry is undergoing a paradigm shift and their favorite buzzword is a clean room. Ad agencies, publishers, and technology providers have long relied on “centralized identification.” They know how to discover, reach, engage, and measure individuals by way of cookies, mobile IDs, and set-top field IDs.
With Google’s decision to end third-party cookie support in Chrome, the data will be lost on which brands once relied upon to gauge advertising returns. Consequently, in a world where user privacy regulations are being strengthened, marketers are heading into a brand new area of marketing analytics where connectivity and addressability are becoming more and more fragmented. Hence, it comes with no surprise that clean room is a hot topic for advertisers.
Interesting Read: Disney Launches Clean Room For Marketers’ First-Party Data Needs
What Does A Clean Room Do?
Data clean rooms are software programs that enable advertisers and brands to match user-level data without sharing any personally identifiable information(PII) or raw data. It was originally arranged by walled gardens such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon to provide advertisers with matched data about how their ads were performing on their platforms.
Image Credit: Search Engine Journal
How Can Advertisers Use The Clean Room?
There are currently two types of clean room: walled gardens, like Google and Amazon, which let brands see inside their own ecosystems. Second, software companies and data managers like Habu or InfoSum act as conduits between parties that wish to share data.
For example, brand partners with a publisher (Google, Amazon, or retailer with a media network). A clean room provides a closer look at campaign performance data like reach, shopper conduct, and engagement for logged-in or registered prospects to both parties. Further, they will relay their first-party data into the clean room and compare it to platform data to enable activation and measurement without revealing user-level details.
Marketers are partnering with expertise suppliers to create their own authentic and privacy-safe clean rooms. The digital sphere is becoming more and more like a federation of private rooms, each with its own distinctive capabilities and information. Also, “Id” is turning more decentralized than before.
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How Should Advertisers Address This?
First, they need to determine which clean room to take advantage of based on their advertising stack and media allocation. Let us understand with an example of Google Ads Data Hub.
Entrepreneurs utilizing Google’s tech stack ought to prioritize Adverts Knowledge Hub for attaining/frequency measurement, marketing campaign supervisor attribution, and DV360 for mapping first-party information. Furthermore, YouTube information is extra efficient when used with the rest of Google’s information, enabling cross-device publicity evaluation.
The next step for advertisers after making the choice is to develop their clean room techniques as follows:
a. Build an audience:
Advertisers will require to build new paths in every clean room for locating and rising audience. They would start with mapping first-party information to every clean room to find present and prospective shoppers. Then analyze and enhance the conduct and efficiency throughout new audiences. This will provide stability as audiences from cookie-based monitoring falls as well as insight into prospects.
b. Brand Engagement
In the absence of cookies, advertisers must shift to a mobile-centric engagement model that allows them to reach shoppers within their in-app experiences and logged-in accounts. Recapturing the information will help device-based remarketing and enable cross-device insights.
c. Measurement and optimization
Deprecating cookies means losing a unified view of the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns throughout the buyer journey. As a result, they have to use cross-device data within every room to find new indicators. Responding to the challenges, advertisers need to provide a framework for the clean room technique.
Furthermore, advertisers would require clean-room measurements and optimization techniques to understand other cell indicators that affect their marketing campaign achievement, frequency goals, and attribution models. Each clean room has its own multi-touch attribution measurement. Afterward, advertisers will want to normalize the load by combining the results across all clean rooms.
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What Does The Future Hold?
In the wake of third-party cookies being deprecated, marketers and publishers are racing to improve first-party data and the overall way they target, measure, and optimize it. Tracking and reporting no longer function in the background and need explicit user consent. As marketers confront the challenges associated with measurement and optimization, there is a clear need to outline a clean room technique. It may be difficult and time-consuming work, but the rewards are enormous. Rather than relying heavily on small samples to infer buyer journeys, it may make more sense to establish, target, and measure audiences by using de-identified information about writers and platforms. Data clean rooms offer a valuable way to collaborate and analyze data in a privacy-compliant way to better understand how customers interact with the brand.
Disney Launches Clean Room For Marketers’ First-Party Data Needs
With the help of first-party data service providers Snowflake, Habu, and InfoSum, the Disney Advertising Sales department has officially created its own data clean room. A ‘ clean room’ is usually leveraged to integrate client proprietary consumer information with other industry data to improve performance. Clean rooms are used to safeguard a company’s data as well as the privacy of its customers.
What makes clean room services appealing to broadcasters is that programmers have dependable linkages to viewers who are signed into OTT services or have monthly subscriptions.
Disney’s announcement is interesting in that it does not include large cloud marketing businesses like Google and AWS, instead of focusing on data and identity vendors who operate across channels.
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Disney Clean Room: What’s In It For Marketers?
The primary idea behind the ‘clean room’ is to help marketers with their first-party data. Through this move, marketers will be able to collaborate with 1,000 first-party sectors, according to Disney.
Furthermore, marketers can use clean rooms to match their first-party data with other industry data in a secure environment. Marketers may match and instigate their needs when it comes to buyer behavior, household features, and psychographics using its first-party segments.
That’s What They Said!
Lisa Valentino, Disney ad sales EVP gave an official statement saying –
We are building data solutions for our clients and marketers anchored in Disney Select’s unrivaled audience-based capabilities. It was important for our clean room offering to be cloud agnostic to provide brands with scale and variation
Drivetime and Omnicom Media Group (OMG) were the first clients to use Disney’s clean room for beta testing. Habu, InfoSum, and Snowflake are also among the data firms taking part in the test.
OMG chief investment officer Geoff Calabrese, said –
This partnership with Disney is about setting the standard for the future of media accountability, and a more accurate understanding of consumer engagement and outcomes – it’s where we need to go as an industry, and OMG is proud to work with Disney in leading the way forward
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