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Clean room and CDP: What's the difference and why you need both
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Most marketing stacks are split down the middle. That division helps explain why connecting paid and owned strategies are still hard for many brands, even as customer expectations for seamless experiences continue to rise. On one side, the channels you own—your site, your app, your email program—are typically powered by a customer data platform (CDP) that knows who your customers are. On the other, is paid media—CTV, display, social, the walled gardens—where the people you most want to reach are the ones you don't know yet. A clean room works that side.
Connecting a CDP and a clean room is how marketers close the gap between them, so a prospect reached in paid media becomes a customer you can recognize and keep engaging in the channels you own. To better understand how a CDP and a clean room differ, it’s useful to first look at the role each plays in connecting paid and owned media.
Ultimately, brands are focused on one thing: performance.
Getting a customer to buy a product, sign up for a newsletter or join a loyalty program is critical for a brand’s bottom line, but doing so isn’t always easy. To deploy high-performing advertising, brands need to find the best in-market customers, create a relationship with them and keep them engaged as their preferences change.
How do you make that happen? By combining the power of martech and adtech.
Martech solutions, like clean rooms and CDPs, can unlock deeper insights about known vs. prospective customers, and allow you to optimize your media activation strategy based on that knowledge. Being able to move that information seamlessly over to the advertising technology is where the rubber really meets the road—that’s where the activation of the data pays off in reaching the right people for your campaign
When adtech and martech can work together, they create a closed-loop system from audience selection to media activation and campaign measurement. And then, that same tech stack combination can take insights from that campaign (and the many before and after it) to apply to future campaigns, starting the cycle all over again. This creates a seamless, personalized customer experience across channels and devices.
Here, we’ll look at the fundamentals for creating a strong martech-to-adtech onramp to help bridge the activation gap across campaigns.
How do you define martech and adtech? Martech is short for marketing technology—the software and tools that marketers use to plan, execute and measure marketing campaigns. Adtech is short for advertising technology—the software and tools for actual ad delivery and optimization. Both of these technologies use customer data to inform their strategies.
In the face of data deprecation, the customer journey is becoming even more fragmented. The best way for you to control your own marketing destiny is to define (and refine) your data strategy.
Some brands have a plethora of first-party data at their fingertips, others don’t. Martech solutions aim to bridge those data gaps. CDPs can organize a brand’s existing first-party data while data clean rooms use a combination of first-, second- and third-party data to help derive audience insights and find prospective customers.
However, it’s not enough to simply have data. The most effective CDPs and clean rooms—like the solutions at Epsilon—will enhance and enrich your data to enable sophisticated marketing insights. Using identity resolution, Epsilon can do this at an individual level.
Customer insights—both of current and prospective customers—drive better media activation. That foundation doesn’t just deliver better ads, it enables:
Adtech can use those insights generated by martech to inform campaign deployment. You can use the insights about customer preferences, including individual paths to purchase and channel engagement, and build a deployment strategy inside your adtech solution across channels.
To deliver personalized experiences, you need to have the best view of your customers. Not only that, you need a view that evolves with your customers.
There are ways to fill in those missing pieces. A CDP equipped with identity resolution organizes your first-party data, helping to unify everything you already have, and cleanses, completes and expands the data by filling in gaps and missing pieces.
This gives you insights into what a customer does outside of your owned channels, so you can go beyond just your first-party data to better understand what people are buying, what they're browsing, what they're watching and on what devices.
They also give you the power to align online and offline data and connect paid media and owned media to natively activate campaigns wherever your customers are for maximum ad effectiveness.
A persistent, unified view of an individual means you can speak to their customers about the right products on the right devices at the right time. It also illuminates the customers who have perhaps fallen off: people who are seasonal shoppers, people who have gone to a competitor, or people who are strong in-market candidates for a product a brand hadn't previously thought to market to them.
When coupled with AI, you can deliver these personalized experiences at scale. This is a game-changer for marketers: it amplifies results, accelerates outcomes and helps drive real business impact.
If you’re unfamiliar with what a data clean room is, it’s a secure environment where data from various sources—including walled gardens, partner data, regulated data and much more—can come together in a privacy-safe way. Clean rooms are important for several reasons:
Even with AI-powered clean rooms, they often start as an empty box. That’s why looking for one that comes pre-loaded with data and identity can be extremely effective to actually execute your strategy—those features give brands a richer view of customers and prospects right out of the box. They take customer data and augment it with the data already built in, so you’re not relying solely on your own data inputs to derive insights. This added capability makes existing customer profiles more comprehensive and identifies potential buyers based on those insights. What’s more, it applies across industries and use cases, from CPG audience expansion to retail customer lookalike modeling.
When adtech and martech work together, it enables brands to funnel the insights derived from a CDP and/or a clean room to deploy hyper-personalized messages. When unified in a single tech stack, and bolstered by a persistent, connected identity, those insights move seamlessly into an activation platform. Campaign measurement is captured in real-time, which provides even more insights into consumer behaviors at the individual and aggregate level that go back into the martech platform.
For example, here's how a CDP (the martech) powered by identity resolution would use insights to develop and deploy programmatic campaigns via a DSP (the adtech).
The right martech is designed to dig deeper into customer insights and uses that knowledge to drive more personalization based on a customer's behaviors and preferences. And this is critical because in today's digital age, customers are used to—and widely expect—ads that cater to them.
When brands demonstrate that they don't know their customers, their customers notice. According to Epsilon research, "The push and pull of personalization," 76% of consumer respondents said they view brands negatively when they include inaccurate information about them in advertising messages. Compare that to the 91% of respondents who said they see at least one irrelevant ad every single day.
Using martech to build a solid data foundation can reduce this problem. Powered by AI, martech becomes an insights tool and a decision-making mechanism that informs your adtech on what to speak to a consumer about right now.
Picture this:
Using martech solutions in conjunction with adtech let this brand see Jane the moment she signed up for their newsletter and develop a relationship with her that ultimately led to conversion. That is the workflow martech and adtech integrations provide: An audience modeled in the clean room, activated in paid media, converted, then recognized in the CDP as a known customer for onward owned-channel engagement—one identity across the whole path.
It's not just customer insights that brands stand to gain, either. When martech is built on a solid foundation of data, and adtech is using that data to deploy campaigns, you have far more certainty when it comes to what's working and why. These solutions are designed to dig deeper into your customers and create better touch points across each person’s journey.
These insights help you optimize your media spend both individually and in aggregate. They discover what channels you need to invest in (or which ones they should pull back from), what campaigns are more effective than others, and discern patterns that can impact overall media buying strategies.
When you have closed-loop insights across all their marketing investments, you can make smarter decisions about how to evolve and enhance your media activation strategy. Because Epsilon has identity resolution at the center, we enable person-based analytics across owned and paid channels.
High-performing marketing requires an omnichannel experience for all customers, not just the ones a brand knows. When adtech and martech work together, they bolster not only stronger customer loyalty, but also help with the acquisition of new customers, reviving dormant ones and overall retention.
New customers can become loyal customers if you nurture that relationship. The right martech lays the foundation to be able to understand those customers across all channels and devices, and the adtech side allows the brand to reach them wherever they are in their journey—with brands and in life.
An adtech partner powered by identity can also expand your retention and acquisition efforts by delivering digital media across paid, owned and earned channels, including on the open web, supporting real channel convergence. Having a single identifier that can be mapped through martech and adtech provides:
Brands are working against many factors that make reaching their customers exponentially harder:
And, as AI becomes integral to marketing, you face an additional challenge of adopting solutions that might be feeding off of bad data or a disjointed tech stack.
Deploying the right martech and adtech helps brands obtain, maintain and understand consumer data to fight against these headwinds.
Brands need acomprehensive, thoughtful data strategy that goes beyond merely collecting data. To understand your best and next best customers, you need a holistic understanding of who each person is, not just how they engage with you. A complete data strategy, powered by connected martech and adtech, uses first-party data, enhanced by zero-, second- and third-party data to drive better customer experiences and higher performing campaigns
This dynamic data strategy allows you to grow with your customers, to fully utilize and develop AI models that are effective and to continually adjust your campaigns across any device or channel as times change.
If you're hoping to bridge the martech and adtech gap, the options can seem overwhelming. With the right vendor, having a seamless, integrated experience that drives better marketing campaigns and customer insights is possible.
At Epsilon, our suite of products is designed to work together. Our solutions power marketers' ability to harmonize engagement with consumers across paid, owned and earned channels with messages that are personalized for each individual.
When you work with a trusted partner like Epsilon, you’ll activate industry-leading identity to get one view of all your customers: what they buy, where to find them and how to engage them. And we’ll help you use that data to identify your entire universe of potential buyers, driving acquisition, retention and growth.
Then, we help brands craft one vision of what matters to each person, engage them with a message they’ll care about and learn more about them with each interaction. That paves the way for conversations with customers that are relevant in the moment and evolve with them to stay relevant over time.
Then, we help develop those messages with one voice, harmonized across paid, owned and earned channels, enabling brands to have a conversation that builds a relationship with each consumer.
Ready to unify your adtech and martech to see customers better, minimize ad waste and deliver stronger results for brand partners? Read more about Epsilon PeopleCloud.
This article was originally published on October 30, 2023, and has since been updated.
