Data clean rooms are a powerful tool for marketers. These safe, pseudonymized spaces allow brands to access known and prospective customer data for analysis and activation. Brands can take marketing and advertising data from many different sources into one, singular view while protecting the privacy of data from each individual source.
These deeper insights allow marketers to engage customers based on their behavior across channels, and use first-party and third-party data to build audiences, activate media and provide measurement.
But not all data clean rooms are the same. The right data clean room will help marketers securely activate their first-party data with direct integration partners across many platforms. This means they can connect with their highest value customers and prospective customers at just the right moment, making every interaction feel more personal and more impactful.
Inspire Brands, one of the largest restaurant companies in the U.S., is among the first brands to use this integration with Epsilon's clean room and Snapchat. Travis Freeman, Chief Media Officer and SVP, Demand Generations at Inspire Brands, said utilizing this type of direct integration has been a game changer.
“At Inspire, we’re focused on turning data into action, and this integration helps us do that with more speed and confidence while better connecting with our highly engaged Gen Z and Millennial audiences,” said Travis Freeman, Chief Media Officer and SVP, Demand Generation at Inspire Brands. “With Snap and Epsilon, we can reach the right guests on one of their most-engaging platforms and understand how our campaigns are driving actual results across our portfolio of brands.”
All brands use some digital platform to advertise their products and services. Platforms like Meta and Google alone boast millions of advertisers, and as digital channels continue to dominate the marketing and advertising space, that number will continue to grow.
Effectively reaching customers on those platforms has become table stakes, which is why direct partner integration is critical. Direct integration gives marketers the power to push audiences developed inside a data clean room out to activation platforms. Because these integrations are direct, brands can securely move audiences from insights to execution with precision and speed.
Brands can immediately activate audiences on platforms like Meta, Google, Snapchat and more and measure the efficacy of campaigns on those platforms in real-time, too.
Many brands activate their campaigns directly on these platforms. So what's the benefit of using a clean room as a starting point?
Data clean rooms bring together a brand's first-party data and third-party and partner data to create unique, custom audiences regardless of what audience/attribute types are available on each individual platform. This creates more granular reach that uses the attributes designed by the intended audience, not what is merely classifiable or available on the platform.
For example: one platform might classify Jane Doe as a nature lover, while another calls her an outdoors enthusiast. Developing solid audience attributes in a clean room before deploying a campaign ensures that Jane Doe gets relevant, nature-related ads on both platforms.
Similarly, a brand may determine that their nature-loving consumers shouldn't receive the same ad across different platforms, just on one. Custom audiences help identify all interested people based on the demographic and determine which platforms and channels to use and which to suppress on an individual basis.
Both custom and deduped audiences are possible because brands can determine a strategy across platforms versus making bespoke strategies on each platform one at a time. Because unique audiences are consistent across platforms, brands can design thoughtful, multi-touch campaigns that incorporates all platforms.
For example, Jane Doe gets her first touch via Meta, her second via Snapchat, and so on.
Having direct integration isn't enough. Without solid audiences, integration and activation doesn't guarantee campaign success.
The right data clean room can build solid audiences based off clean, harmonized and unified data. Data clean rooms pre-equipped with data and identity resolution can help brands build better audiences on day one, regardless of how much (or how little) first-party data a brand has.
Most independent clean rooms come as an empty box that a brand is expected to fill. For brands without a lot of first-party data, it can be hard to find value in the clean room because they have limited data to analyze and glean insights from. They would need to rely heavily on partners and purchased third-party data to make the clean room investment valuable, thus tacking on costs to an already-expensive technology investment (not to mention the additional procurement involved).
A clean room that is equipped with identity and data enables brands to understand their current customers more deeply, build lookalike audiences based on their best customers and transform those unauthenticated customers into known ones.
At Epsilon, our proprietary data gives marketers insights into 250M+ unique U.S. individuals anchored in name and address to create audiences of those most likely to buy. It also helps identify who isn't in market, helping marketers spend media budgets more effectively.
READ MORE: Acquire new customers
With a complete, dynamic and persistent understanding of user behavior, preferences and demographics, you can personalize marketing campaigns, improving ad engagement and overall campaign performance.
And this matters: A survey from Epsilon on how consumers view personalized marketing and advertising shows that 76% of respondents said they view a brand negatively when they include inaccurate information about them in their marketing message. Even more interesting is that 91% said they see at least one irrelevant ad or marketing message a day.
The right data clean room enables brands to not only unify and expand their first-party data, but to gain a single, comprehensive view of their universe of potential buyers. And then use that view to craft a relevant message on the right channel at the right time. With person-first marketing, you’re able to understand, engage and learn from conversations with consumers on a 1:1 basis, across channels.
Clean rooms built with direct integration and built-in data and identity give brands the power to activate their campaigns with confidence. At Epsilon, we partner with several platforms for immediate activation including Meta, Google, Snapchat, Amazon, Pinterest, The Trade Desk and Yahoo.
Key benefits include:
For example: Epsilon's direct integration with Snapchat saw match rates improve up to 50% for audience activation, enabling more precise targeting for campaigns.
