In today’s digital landscape, data-driven marketing strategies are essential for brands to stay competitive.
For many, that means adopting a customer data platform (CDP) to harmonize, clean and enhance their own data, or working with a data partner help fill the gaps in the data they do have. But another option for brands looking to use and expand their first-party data to understand their known and prospective customers more, there are more options than just a traditional CDP.
This is where data clean rooms come in. You may be wondering, what is a clean room? They enable a privacy-safe environment to data enrichment, activation, collaboration and measurement. Data clean rooms are a powerful solution for brands seeking to gain deep customer insights, put those insights to work and measure their effectiveness.
But with their growing popularity, there's also a lot of misunderstanding about exactly what a "clean room" is and what it can (or can't) do. To set the record straight on this data-driven solution, here are four common misperceptions about data clean rooms and what those notions get wrong.
At first glance, some marketers see clean rooms as nothing more than an empty box they have to fill, and if they don't have a lot of their own data inputs to add, what's the point?
To adequately solve a brand's marketing needs, they must also contract a data onboarder, an identity resolution provider, and third-party data sets from a reputable source. It just feels like another tech product they don't need that won't actually glean meaningful insight. This misperception holds true for most clean rooms—but not all.
A high-quality clean room should come pre-loaded with data and identity. This gives you access to your entire universe of potential customers, including current and prospects who are ready to buy. The right clean room should be able to help brands:
Why does this matter? Having identity and data built in from day one allows brands to incorporate first-, second- and premium third-party data that helps you understand who your customers are, what they buy (and why), where to find them and when to engage them, driving retention and growth. It also eliminates the need for additional tech contracts and partners and simplifies the process of data enhancement in a single solution.
A complex tech stack can be intimidating to those who don't have extensive backgrounds in data science. While the technology behind clean rooms is sophisticated, the capabilities of this tool have evolved to be low-code or no-code environments that anyone can use. Results are presented through a user interface that allows for easy interpretation of the data collaboration.
This means data scientists, marketers, strategists and planners have simple access to and use of the clean room environment.
However, marketers and data scientists may need to use a clean room differently and want the flexibility to customize their clean room's capabilities. While data scientists may require sophisticated analytical capabilities to support their more complex, custom modeling needs, marketers may need a more friendly UI where they can create segments and audiences with ease. Not all clean rooms offer both sets of capabilities.
The right clean room should be able to meet all of its users needs. Make sure you're considering who will use your clean room, and ask potential partners whether they can support a variety of users, and if so, what do those differences actually look like?
Because many people assume clean rooms come as empty containers, they also assume you need a lot of first-party data to make one worthwhile. This assumption may stem from the fact that data clean rooms are a popular martech product among retailers because of their rich customer data.
But they aren’t the only ones that can find value from clean rooms. These versatile tools can benefit a wide range of industries, including healthcare, financial services, travel, entertainment, CPG and restaurants. Why? Because not all clean rooms come empty.
Clean rooms equipped with data and identity are essential tools for brands without a lot of first-party data. These spaces allow for brands to enhance what first-party data they have with identity resolution, and also collaborate with other types of data too, like third-party and partner data. This makes it perfect for non-retail brands who need to supplement their first-party data or who have several different data sources that are most useful when working in tandem.
You don’t need a specific platform or the same tech stack as other data collaboration partners to use a data clean room. Your clean room should be flexible, convenient and interoperable with any partner to collaborate regardless of your existing technology stack. A valuable clean room provider will help you break away from closed systems with limited choice to enable all players to maximize their opportunities.
Your clean room should be interoperable with any tech stack or solution, but there are efficiencies to aligning your clean room and your activation solution. For example, marketers can launch programmatic campaigns directly from Epsilon's clean room because it's directly connected to our programmatic marketplace, which largely gives them greater media reach without any data loss since it's all on the same tech stack. In fact, with our programmatic capabilities, we typically find that clients can reach 2-3x more of their customers on the open web.
Epsilon Clean Room is an industry-recognized martech solution that offers pre-built data and identity with an interface that works for everyday marketers and data scientists.
Learn how Epsilon Clean Room can open your world to a universe of new faces.
