Data clean rooms are making a lot of noise lately. They are seen as the perfect solution in a world of data obsolescence: brands can collaborate and maximize the value of their first-party data by running sophisticated analytics to understand customer behavior, purchase journeys, and more. And thanks to privacy-friendly technologies, brands don’t have to reveal their customers’ personal data in the process.
But the market has grown so fast that it’s causing confusion. Some marketers ask me, “What’s the fuss? Clean rooms are nothing new.” And they’re right—in a Q2 2024 survey, 87% of B2C marketers said they use a data clean room for marketing use cases today. New vendors and new use cases have expanded the landscape to the point where it’s the same size as the customer data platform (CDP) market in 2018. “Data clean room” has become an umbrella term that encompasses technologies that serve different purposes.
Marketers can choose between two types of cleanrooms
The first step in planning a data cleanroom is, of course, to define your use case and end goals. From there, the market breaks down into two distinct categories:
- Walled gardens. Walled gardens provide a data clean room that allows marketers to access detailed metrics. These include Google Ads Data Hub and advertising partners like Pinterest, Disney and NBCU. They argue that the data clean room allows them to protect their customers’ data while giving advertisers the insights they need to measure ROAS and optimize performance.
- Collaboration platforms. This category supports two or more partners working together on an equal footing for mutual benefit, such as identifying co-marketing opportunities. These platforms can also support collaboration between different partner types, such as collaboration between brands, brands and agencies, or brands and publishers. Cloud data warehouses such as Snowflake, AWS, and Google Cloud Platform provide data cleanrooms, and many applications and services build their own functionality on top of these solutions.
I will be working on a data cleanroom landscape report later this year. If you are a marketer trying to navigate the landscape, schedule a consultation session to dive deeper and create a shortlist. If you are a data cleanroom provider and would like to be considered for the landscape, please get in touch.
