Clean Data Rooms and the New Rules of Customer Privacy

Clean data rooms give 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 clean data room environment benefits more than just sales. Clean data 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 clean data room?

A clean data room, also known as data clean room, is a system that anonymizes first-party and zero-party data. 

Clean data 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 clean data operations, which were physical rooms. Now, distributed data clean rooms — which are cloud-based — are much more prevalent.

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

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

Who benefits from clean data rooms?

Brands and businesses

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

Clean data rooms can attribute demos, sales and other types of conversion points to specific sources — all without tying the information back to specific 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, in addition to a better subscriber experience.

Among the benefits of clean data 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 clean data rooms shields companies from potential liability in case of a privacy law breach. 

Consumers

As more companies use clean data 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 companies.

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 clean data 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 clean data room. 

What Brands Need to Know About Using Cloud-Based Clean Data 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, like clean data rooms, 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 clean data rooms now provide the security businesses need. 

How 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. The EU’s GDPR laws, as well as the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), are just the beginning, and major companies like Apple and Google are already in the process of planning to get rid of the third-party cookie. 

It’s changing how sales operations and information teams operate. Previously, secure data sharing through APIs and FTPs gave companies the ability to cross-reference data. Now, clean data 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 clean data rooms to collaborate with potential brand partners and to glean information from all consumer-facing teams. 

Ways Brands and Retailers Can Leverage Clean Data Rooms for Growth

Brands and retailers can merge and analyze data in clean data rooms to improve sales operations, marketing and advertising. Here are three ways to leverage clean data 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 clean data rooms, companies that create products can collaborate with retailers, getting their product 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 data room. 

2. Collect and review consumer data — and put it to good use — without compromising privacy

From campaign creation to attribution, marketing and advertising teams can use the data from a clean data 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 data clean room increases customer trust, so consider how you will communicate your commitment to security to your audience. 

Fetch’s Approach to Clean Data Rooms

Clean data 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.