Omnicom and Criteo Unveil First-Of-Its-Kind Retail Insights Alliance
The multinational marketing and corporate communications firm Omnicom and the commerce media business Criteo have announced an expansion of their current collaboration. Moreover, both companies are extending their previously announced relationship in commerce data to include insights from Criteo’s extensive retailer network and digital shelf data. Omnicom will be the initial holding company to collaborate with Criteo. The project has been referred to as a first-mover cooperation. The alliance comes after the two businesses announced a data-sharing agreement during the Cannes Lions Festival in June. InfoSum, a data clean room processor would incorporate the data into Omnicom’s in-house, custom Omni platform.
Criteo’s investment in Commerce Insights
Criteo’s decision to invest in Commerce Insights comes from its strategic acquisition of Gradient, an intelligent insights platform. Criteo is recognized as a pioneer in applied machine learning. The National Retail Federation has predicted $41.5 billion in the US for the back-to-school this year. With the start of the holiday shopping season, consumers are looking for the best deals and advertisers are trying to capture their attention. With Commerce Insights, advertisers get visibility into sales rank, attribute sales, and other metrics to allow for data-driven decision-making. These decisions will be the basis for the entirety of the commerce media lifecycle. It will include media planning to campaign execution and optimization.
Read More: Omnicom Integrates With NBCU’s Clean Room Facility
Omnicom’s commitment to leveraging commerce insights
Both Omnicom and Criteo ran a trial earlier this year. The Omnicom team implemented the use of the Criteo digital shelf data. They observed a 22 percent rise in the total return on advertising spending (ROAS) goals. With the acquisition of Outpromo and Global Shopper, Omnicom has increased the scope of its connected commerce business. Furthermore, both businesses are the top linked commerce and ritual media firms in Brazil. The holding firm introduced Omni Commerce, the first linked commerce arrangement solution in the market, in June.
Here’s what they said
Frank Kochenash, Global CEO of Omnicom’s connected commerce and e-retail consultancy Transact stated in the announcement,
This collaboration is another example of how Omnicom is co-creating with other marketplace leaders to develop unique utility and competitive advantages for our clients in this rapidly evolving space. Operationalizing Criteo’s suite of insights and tools within our Omni marketing orchestration system, our teams will be able to better optimize our clients’ investments across retailers, improve their brands’ standing in their categories, and help them exceed ROAS goals.
Brian Gleason, Chief Revenue Officer at Criteo said,
With this partnership, our insights technology will empower Omnicom’s clients to better understand the impact of their advertising by gaining unprecedented visibility into their share of shelf, their share of the category, and more product-level insights than ever before. As we head into the busy back-to-school and holiday season, advertisers are looking to prove the value of their investments and media budget, and Criteo is giving them the tools needed to succeed in the ever-complex retail media ecosystem.
Read More: Google and Omnicom Collaborate to Enhance Advertising with Generative AI
Amazon Announces AWS Clean Rooms To Boost Adtech Growth
AWS launched a new service that will help customers and their partners inside an advertising or marketing organization share, analyze and collaborate on combined datasets without running the risk of revealing personal data. With AWS Clean Rooms, customers can create a secure data clean room in minutes and collaborate with any other company in the AWS Cloud to generate unique insights about advertising campaigns, investment decisions, clinical research, and more.
Amazon intends to capitalize on its success as a digital advertising platform as it foresees a void in data capabilities for advertisers when Google deprecates third-party cookies later next year. During the Amazon Ads Unboxed conference, Amazon highlighted the product as a homegrown data clean room. AWS clean rooms and planned identity resolution tools target brand marketers, agencies, publishers, and martech companies to provide purpose-built services.AWS Clean Rooms also includes advanced cryptographic computing tools that keep data encrypted, even as queries are processed, to comply with stringent data handling policies.
How does it work?
Credit: AWS
AWS data clean rooms explained
Data clean rooms are protected environments where multiple parties can collaborate and analyze data without revealing raw data. Amazon is also enabling customers to leverage clean rooms by addressing the old-school way of data sharing.- one company often has to provide a copy of their user-level data to their partners and rely on contractual agreements to prevent misuse.
They are hard and expensive to build, require complex privacy controls, and specialized tools to protect each participant’s data, and are time-consuming in customizing analytics tools. After building up a data clean room, it needs constant data updates for new collaborators and data types. Amazon is addressing these challenges with AWS data clean room. AWS allows 5 parties to collaborate in one collaboration.
For instance, an automotive brand with customer loyalty data can collaborate with another brand that has data on a user’s ad-clicking behavior for better insight and user experience. The idea is for brands and media publishers to set up a clean room and collaborate over data in a few clicks than spending time to build it. Companies collaborate, and contribute their data in any type while protecting the underlying data using configurable controls.
The company emphasizes the importance of sharing data for improving the effectiveness of advertising campaigns. In the future, third-party cookies will disappear, whereas tech giants like Apple will give consumers more control over their data privacy giving them more knowledge about how their data is being used.
Identity Resolution
In the coming months, AWS will also introduce new identity resolution capabilities to help businesses match and link customer records stored across disparate channels without the need to build and maintain complex workflows. The press release stated that with identity resolution capabilities, customers can create a unified view of their interactions with consumers. Companies who want to collaborate with other partners in a clean room can use automated identity resolution workflows that identify common user IDs across datasets and help them more easily join data together.
AWS Clean Rooms is available as a standalone offering and as part of AWS for Advertising and Marketing. It will be available in early 2023 on the U.S. East and West coasts as well as parts of Asia Pacific and Europe.
The Amazon Marketing Cloud
Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) is a secure, privacy-safe clean room application from Amazon Ads on Amazon Web series infrastructure. Marketers can use it for custom analytics and cross-channel analysis. Builders can utilize AMC APIs to create their own offerings, while analysts can interact with a user interface available through the Amazon Ad Console.
AMC’s core value proposition is its ability to ingest both in-store and direct-to-consumer sales. In Amazon’s clean room, this data can be integrated into analytics reports for advertisers to understand total sales and which channels are generating incremental sales. Paula Despins, vice president of Ads Measurement at Amazon Ads said,
“Providing marketers with greater control over their own signals, while being able to analyze them in conjunction with signals from Amazon Ads, is crucial in today’s marketing landscape.”
“By migrating AMC’s compute infrastructure to AWS Clean Rooms under the hood, marketers can use their own signals in AMC without moving data out of their AWS environment. This simplifies how marketers can manage their signals and enables AMC teams to focus on building new capabilities for brands.”
How clean are clean rooms?
There is a lot of debate around data clean rooms safety and security and remains an open question. Programmatic landscapes are evolving, and clean rooms are just one part of them. Insider Intelligence shows that 37% of media owners and agencies respectively are increasing their investment in clean rooms. Earlier this year, Omnicom, Roku, and Disney launched clean rooms.
Security concerns arise despite the fact that they do not reveal private customer information. Thus, businesses must ensure that they adhere to consistent security and privacy rules or risk consumers calling them out. Thus, businesses must ensure that they adhere to consistent security and privacy rules or risk consumers calling them out.
More to Read: Clean Rooms Explained: How Marketers Can Prepare For Cookieless World
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.
Interesting Read: Clean Rooms Explained: How Marketers Can Prepare For Cookieless World
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.
Interesting Read: End Of Third-Party Cookies, What Is There For Marketers: Takeaway!
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
