Data Clean Rooms and the New Rules of Customer Privacy

A data clean room provides brands and retailers access to protected, cloud-based environments where they can securely leverage consumer data. These rooms allow brands and retailers to enrich consumer-supplied data, find new segments to target and access detailed post-campaign analytics. 

Typically, sales and operations teams support the technical management of clean data rooms. But access to a data clean room environment benefits more than enterprise teams. Data clean rooms. like those powered by Snowflake, can direct marketing initiatives, product development and customer success — all while maintaining your audience’s privacy. 

What is a data clean room?

A data clean room is a system that anonymizes first-party and zero-party data. 

Data clean rooms allow marketers and advertisers to:

• Streamline data sharing between parties
• Access private but specific querying
• Manage data free from litigation and privacy concerns
• Show their audience that they are dedicated to maintaining shopper data privacy

The term is derived from original data cleaning operations, which were physical rooms. Now, distributed data clean rooms — which are cloud-based — are much more prevalent.

Data clean rooms allow the owner to choose how anyone with access can use it, which analytics users can parse and whether users can export data. Then, partners and advertisers can access the anonymized data in the environment for analytics, audience measures and engagement metrics. They may also use it for audience segmentation, activation and attribution.

Additionally, traditional data sharing methods, like APIs and FTPs, provide minimal personal identifying information (PII) privacy. Data clean rooms, often administered and managed by clean data room providers like Snowflake, address these challenges and provide support to help users and partners operate as efficiently as possible.

Who benefits from data clean rooms?

Brands and businesses

With data clean rooms, companies can build a reputation of ethically and carefully handling consumer information while improving personalization and revenue tracking. They also build consumer trust. 

Data clean rooms can attribute demos, sales and other types of conversion points to specific sources — all without tying the information back to individual consumers. Brands can combine data sources and conduct detailed analyses to learn more about their audiences. This, in turn, can improve advertising campaigns with more advanced targeting and media measurement. All of this is possible without accessing consumers’ PII. Over time, this can lead to new attribution reporting and accelerated advertising revenue, as well as a better subscriber experience.

Among the benefits of data clean rooms is the ability to simplify reporting and explore consumer trends. Without a clean data environment, there is no way to securely access these types of in-depth analyses due to PII and privacy regulations. 

Finally, using data clean rooms shields companies from potential liability in case of a privacy law breach. 

Consumers

As more companies use data clean rooms, consumers will start to enjoy a more private and secure online experience. Their identifying information will remain safe, used only by the companies that consumers themselves provide it to – not shared with advertisers or other business entities.

Advertisers and agencies

Significant work hours and budget go into creating effective ad campaigns, but proving the success of each initiative, as well as conducting audience optimization at scale, can be a challenge. By using data clean rooms, organizations can attribute their wins to the particular channel, source or campaign that got them there. Additionally, agencies can get insights into their clients’ reach and other metrics by querying that company’s data clean room. 

What brands need to know about using cloud-based clean rooms to grow their business

Shoppers consistently relinquish personal data, even when they’re not sure where it goes. As new initiatives phase out cookies, data privacy will become more important to consumers. Shoppers want to know who has their data, where it’s being shared and why. 

When brands, retailers and advertisers are transparent with their customers, they can build trust and establish an audience of loyal brand followers. Using secure data management tools can help companies continue to establish brand partnerships while maintaining data security. 

The laws around consumer privacy rights are catching up to consumer sentiment. As a result, sales and product development teams have had to find new strategies for ethical collaboration and data use. Targeting consumers in personal and relevant ways is still possible, but data clean rooms now provide the security businesses need. 

New data privacy regulations have changed personalized advertising and marketing

Over the past few years, consumers have expressed frustration at the way companies use their data. People have learned that when they get a newsletter from an unknown company, it’s because one company they trusted shared their contact information. They’ve learned that third-party cookies track their activity online and can be used by companies to advertise to them down the line. 

As a result, lawmakers all over the world have started creating legislation around consumer online privacy rights, and this is changing how sales and information teams operate. Previously, secure data sharing through APIs and FTPs gave companies the ability to cross-reference data. Now, data clean rooms are the most secure way to leverage consumer data between departments or companies.  

Brands and advertisers have transitioned to collecting zero-party data — information that helps curate a user’s shopping experience that they provide willingly and knowingly. Marketers can also use data clean rooms to collaborate with potential brand partners and to glean information from all consumer-facing teams. 

How can brands and retailers leverage clean rooms for growth?

Brands and retailers can merge and analyze data in data clean rooms to improve sales operations, marketing and advertising. Here are three ways to leverage clean rooms for business growth.

1. Merge data from 2+ parties securely and analyze for partnership, integration, co-marketing and product development opportunities

Even with changes to the online privacy landscape, it’s still possible to do productive, collaborative audience creation with partners. For example, with data clean rooms, companies that create products can collaborate with retailers, getting their brand in front of new customers online without resorting to list sharing. 

Companies can also get a sense of a potential partner’s reach, success and whether they’re a viable collaborator by seeing the high-level trends shared in a clean room. 

2. Collect, review and act on consumer data without compromising privacy

From campaign creation to attribution, marketing and advertising teams can use the data from a data clean room to discover new audiences, boost advertising campaign results, re-engage existing customers, find out what’s working and why and keep the business growing.

3. Improve customer experiences with increased data protection

Customers need to know that businesses take their privacy seriously. Companies that respect consumer privacy can more readily build customer loyalty. A clean room increases customer trust, so consider how you will communicate your commitment to security to your audience. 

Fetch’s approach to data clean rooms

Data clean rooms help brands and retailers uncover new business growth opportunities in a secure environment. That’s why Fetch brand partners use Snowflake data clean rooms to conduct protected data analyses that lead to brand growth. Get the most out of consumer data in a secure environment by partnering with Fetch.