At Optable we view interoperability first and foremost through the lens of digital advertising’s critical systems. And when you consider the systems used for ad campaign planning, activation, and measurement, you quickly realize that these systems were all inherently interoperable for a long time thanks to widespread data sharing. With identity and data sharing on their way out for a variety of reasons, new ways of interoperating within each of these systems are required. Clean rooms are a way to achieve data interoperability in advertising, and that’s why we have invested significantly in this area.

But, the trouble with clean rooms is that both parties have to agree to use the same one in order to interoperate. The central idea with clean room technologies is that two or more parties come together around a neutral compute environment, enabling them to agree on operations to perform on their respective datasets, on the structure of their input datasets, on the outputs generated by the operations and, importantly, on who has access to the outputs. Additionally, various privacy enhancing technologies may be used to limit and constrain the outputs and the information pertaining to the underlying input datasets that is revealed.

So, what does true interoperability look like for data collaboration platforms, built from the ground up for digital advertising? Here are three important pillars:

✅ Integration with leading DWH clean room service layers. A DWH clean room service layer is the set of primitives (APIs and interfaces) made available by leading DWHes (Google, AWS, Snowflake, etc), that enables joining of disparate organization datasets, and purpose limited computation. Optable streamlines this by automating the flow of minimized data to/from DWHes, and by federating code to these environments. The end result? A collaborator with audience data sitting in Snowflake can easily match their audience data to an Optable customer's first party data, all within Snowflake using Snowflake DCR primitives to enable trust, without the Optable customer lifting a finger. In this example the matching itself happens inside of Snowflake, but the same thing can be done with other DWH clean room service layers as well.

✅ Compatibility with open, secure multi-party compute protocols like Private Set Intersection (PSI). What if your partner wants to match their audience data with you but they cannot move their data into a cloud based DWH? SMPC protocols such as PSI enable double blind matching on encrypted datasets, without requiring decryption of data throughout. Open-source implementations provide an independently verifiable, albeit purpose constrained clean room service layer. The end result? A collaborator with audience data sitting on premise can execute an encrypted match with an Optable customer using a free, open-source utility.

✅ Built-in entity resolution, audience management and activation, with deep integration to all major cloud and data environments. In the real world, few organizations have all of their user data assets neatly connected in a single environment. Sure, they exist, but more often than not, organizations need to do quite a bit of work to gather, normalize, sanitize, and connect their user data so that they can effectively plan, activate, and measure using data collaboration systems. It’s therefore no wonder that when the IAB issued their State of Data report earlier this year, respondents cited time frames of months up to years to get up and running with clean room tech! Moreover, even when one company has got their user data together, their partners often require help with entity resolution. These are the reasons why Optable makes it easy to connect user data sitting in any cloud environment or system into a cohesive and unified user record view, out of the box, with no code required. Got part of your user data in your CRM? And another sitting in cloud storage? And another in your DWH? No problem.

At Optable, we believe that these pillars are the groundwork on top of which interoperability can happen, and we’re partnering with industry peers who share the same vision. Stay tuned for more exciting announcements on this front!

One of the most common misconceptions about data clean rooms and data collaboration is that there are requirements on having tons of identified data. 

Most publishers we meet have this concern:  “Do we really have enough data to drive significant revenue? Won’t we be limited by the size of the match, and therefore won’t be able to run any media at scale?“

Typically they are surprised to learn that mitigating low volumes of identified data is part of the solutions offered today by this class of data collaboration technology.

No matter how little identified data any given publisher has, they can benefit from growth using data collaboration technologies. The reason is quite simple:  any campaign is better off when it starts with real data. 

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Unlocking Audience Insights and Prospecting Powers

Following a match with an advertiser, the publisher has a few options: one, a simple one, is simply to have insights on the matched audience. The publisher can better understand the brand’s customers or prospects as a function of their own data, which in turn allows them to create better media products.  It also shows the brand that the publisher reaches the right audience for them.  Insights are offered as a report that provides aggregate numbers – by definition, it is a privacy-safe product. 

The second, and an important one, is the possibility of creating a prospecting audience out of the match.  Optable’s prospecting clean room app automatically creates an expanded audience that provides scale, performance and value when it comes to reaching the right audience.  Not only that, but we do it in a privacy-safe manner, since the publisher does not learn the intersection – only the prospecting audience becomes eligible for targeting. 

Considering that a publisher’s audience consists of both identified and unidentified users who share a number of traits, Optable prospecting clean room app allows a publisher to configure a model that ultimately creates an addressable audience that is sizable enough to drive significant growth. 

For brands, the use of customer or prospect data also doesn’t have a limiting factor – in fact, there are few brands that can boast having significant data on all their customers. For everyone else, the objective is to have some data – enough to allow our systems to make better audience decisions. 

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Optable’s approach

We make publisher-driven data collaboration easy for all parties:  our end-to-end solution includes direct integration for activation straight from the clean room environment, and offers frictionless interoperability. 

Given the emergence of retail media and the democratization of data through data warehouse clean room APIs, data collaboration is quickly becoming a major revenue opportunity. 

Forward-looking publishers who are looking for revenue growth must prioritize future-proof, privacy-safe solutions to driving revenue.

Canadian news and journalism outlets have entered into a fierce battle with Google and Meta over the recently enacted Bill C-18, also known as the Online News Act. This legislation, passed by the Canadian government on June 22, 2023, aims to support the Canadian journalism ecosystem by establishing a tax that "digital news intermediaries" such as Google and Meta must pay to the content owners they link to.

In a familiar pattern observed in similar laws like Australia's News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code, Meta and Google have retaliated by removing links from their platforms including Instagram, Facebook, and Google Search. Unfortunately, this response undermines the very essence of the bill and is expected to inflict financial harm on Canadian journalism. While Google and Meta argue that they only seek a fair market share for their services, publishers contend that this is unjustified since Google and Meta generate billions in advertising revenue while journalists struggle to make ends meet.
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The advertising industry responds with a call for sustainable, ethical & socially responsible advertising practices

The dynamics at play here are further complicated by the fact that media agencies and brands, responsible for a significant portion of news media revenues, control advertising spend. This advertising spend is the primary source of revenue for Google & Meta, which famously represent 80% of online advertising revenue in the country.

Traditionally, Canadian brands and their agencies have allocated the majority of their advertising budgets to these two companies. However, there is a growing trend, driven by recent legislation and broader shifts in advertising, to directly invest media dollars with local publishers. Many agencies and brands have committed to supporting Canadian publishers in light of this impasse. For example, the A2C in Quebec has already taken steps to incentivize collaboration between agencies, brands, and local publishers. Some agencies view this issue as a matter of ethics and social responsibility. Prominent figures in the agency world, like Sarah Thompson, President of Dentsu Media and Brian Cuddy, SVP Responsible Media Solutions at Cossette have been vocal advocates for supporting Canadian news publishers. In response to the announcement from Facebook that all Canadian news will be removed from their platforms within weeks Sarah took to her LinkedIn to share support for local news “We are at a moment of time where action is required to support local owned media, which is more than news.”

In addition to developments within the Canadian ecosystem, there are emerging trends in how marketers allocate their paid media budgets. Advertising executives are increasingly interested in investing more heavily in contextual advertising and leveraging publishers' first-party data for better targeting. There is also heightened scrutiny around programmatic channels, which lack transparency in terms of media ROI. Consequently, there is a growing preference for direct buying. Moreover, measurement strategies are shifting away from the digital attribution focus of the past decade towards more traditional methods, such as brand lift analysis, media mix modeling, third-party audience measurement, and the use of consumer research data and studies.

In essence, these trends indicate a change in the attitudes and choices of CMOs and agency leaders. They are actively supporting a more open and equitable internet through their advertising investments.
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While the dust settles, open internet publishers can prepare for the future

Similar to other legislations, it is probable that Google and Meta will have to pay millions of dollars directly to media owners to avoid taxation. However, the process of finalizing these deals will require time, leaving publishers to suffer from decreased traffic and increased competition with these tech giants for ad revenue. In the long run, there is a possibility that Google and Meta might modify their platforms by completely removing links. The economic landscape has evolved for these companies, and it is not unreasonable to consider their initial link removal as a test to assess long-term effects on user engagement and potential revenue. 

To minimize risk, publishers can take proactive measures to future-proof their businesses. 

Here are some recommendations:

• Build a direct sales model that is data-driven - By hiring commercial professionals with a strong background in data and educating your sales teams on how your organization leverages data to develop advertising products, you can make a significant impact. Google and Meta have achieved tremendous success by adopting a data-centric approach to advertising sales, and marketers will seek partners who possess similar capabilities. The indirect revenue generated from large platforms and programmatic partners will likely remain at risk as marketers shift their strategies. Publishers who can effectively execute direct sales efforts will reap the benefits of these changes.

• Invest in a data collaboration platform - Google and Meta's value proposition lies in empowering advertisers to leverage their own audience data for precise targeting and robust measurement. Recent advancements in data clean room and collaboration technologies have enabled publishers to directly provide these capabilities while safeguarding user privacy and ensuring scalability. Data clean rooms and collaboration solutions now play a pivotal role in publisher's' ability to offer innovative solutions to advertising partners and drive ad revenue growth

• Work with technology partners that help you manage your data better, faster, and more efficiently - Having partners who possess a comprehensive understanding of audience data is crucial. Developing a robust data strategy can be intricate, encompassing diverse approaches like identity management, real-time audience building, and ad activation system integrations. For publishers, collaborating with forward-thinking partners is vital, as they can provide a versatile system that extends beyond advertising to content personalization and marketing applications.

• Don't forget your biggest advantage, your content! - News publishers are the ultimate storytellers, directly connecting with their audiences. With this unique position, you not only gain invaluable insights into their preferences but, armed with the right tools, also deepen your understanding of them. This fundamental knowledge becomes vital as more publishers creatively leverage data to amplify co-branded content, sponsorships, audience creation, and other aspects of advertising. By employing these strategies, you can draw in more advertisers and bolster your revenues.

Canadian publishers are witnessing promising support from agencies, brands, and the public, indicating a positive trajectory. Coupled with the growth of future-proof data collaboration technologies, this presents remarkable opportunities for news media publishers to revolutionize their advertising revenue generation. The Online News Act, a legislation that foreshadows the future of news consumption, holds great significance not only for Canadians, but also for Americans, as similar bills have reached Congress. In the midst of these advancements, we find ourselves at a critical juncture for the open internet, journalism, and democracy as a whole. Numerous Canadian publishers have already partnered with Optable to safeguard their advertising businesses, and for those who haven't, we are prepared to provide our assistance!

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Today the IAB Tech Lab is publishing version 1.0 of the Open Private Join and Activation (OPJA) clean room interoperability standard. Throughout the past year, together with a growing number of industry collaborators and members of the Tech Lab’s Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) and Rearc Addressability working groups, our team played a leading role in developing OPJA with the goal of enabling interoperable privacy safe ad activation based on PII data.

Beyond our work on the initial proposal, we have several broader goals with OPJA:

1. We aim to define an open and standard set of requirements for a type of clean room operation that enables an advertiser and a publisher to match sensitive datasets containing user PII, such as email addresses or phone numbers, while limiting information exchange between parties as much as possible.
   
   
2. We want to develop and promote the adoption of standard mechanisms in OpenRTB that enable ad targeting of OPJA-matched user ad impressions, using any compatible SSP or DSP.

3. We want to provide open reference implementations that enable OPJA while adhering to the stated requirements.
   
   
4. We want to support both OPJA’s encrypted labels as a way of securely activating matched audiences from Optable, as well as interoperate with other vendors based on OPJA’s secure matching mechanisms.

While we think that there is room for clean room vendors and collaboration platforms to offer their own proprietary spin on the activation use case (many already do), we’re hoping that they will make an effort to evaluate and align their implementations to better adhere to OPJA, and we intend to make it easy for them to do so.

In order to achieve our goals, agreeing on an independently trustable manner in which user data can be matched and activated in the multi clean room vendor setting was imperative.

Doing this work in the open is essential, as it ensures that it is widely accessible and that any vendor can contribute ideas and review the proposed protocols and technologies. Open-source promotes transparency, collaboration, and inclusiveness in the development process. We believe that providing a common foundation that anyone can access, modify, and contribute to is essential to achieving interoperability between all vendors, instead of a select few.

Why Activation?

We decided to focus our initial interoperability standards efforts on the activation use case not only because it is a frequently encountered use case in industry, but also because we have noticed confusion regarding the extent to which user information is exchanged between parties that enable the use case in proprietary ways today.

On the surface, activation of overlapping audiences matched using a clean room is straightforward. Consider the case of an advertiser with a list of customers that wants to display ads to those customers when they are interacting with a publisher’s websites or applications. If users have provided personally identifying information, such as their email address, to both the publisher and advertiser directly, then the advertiser and publisher can compare datasets in a clean room in order to construct an audience of overlapping users. Here’s a Venn diagram illustrating the operation:

While seemingly simple on the surface, when it comes to the sharing of information associated with individual users, there are several subtle but material differences that may arise when such an operation is performed in practice. Notably, what new user information could the advertiser and publisher parties learn as a result of performing the match and targeting operation? Will the advertiser be able to track which of its individual customers are also browsing the publisher’s websites? And will the publisher learn which of its registered users are also the advertiser’s customers?

To answer such questions, a standard set of security and privacy design goals, input and output requirements, and clear documentation regarding the extent to which private user information is exchanged between parties when enabling the ad activation use case were all elaborated and made part of the OPJA specification. Ultimately, our goal with OPJA is to enable ad targeting on overlapping users without the parties leaking user information to each other. This is not only good for end user privacy, but it also prevents data sharing that could be exploited by competitors.

Raising the Privacy Bar

A defining characteristic of clean rooms is their potential to limit the scope of the processing of user data controlled by multiple parties. A simple example of this in practice is the construction of an aggregate report describing the intersection of two audiences originating from separate parties. In such a report, the joining, grouping, aggregation, and statistical noise injection can all be performed in a data clean room, thus preventing either party from learning anything about the other party’s data, other than what is included in the prescribed report.

This limiting capability of data clean rooms is inherent in the activation matching operation prescribed by the OPJA specification. In OPJA, a secure match is performed in order to determine which individual users are in the intersection of audiences originating from an advertiser and a publisher. Rather than the list of matched users being shared with either party, the presence or absence of each user in the intersection is encoded in the form of a label and is then encrypted. These encrypted user labels are shared with the publisher who cannot decrypt them, but who is able to insert them into ad requests. Ad requests are processed by ad tech (SSPs and DSPs), and only the advertiser’s designated DSP can decrypt corresponding match labels, enabling the DSP to make decisions on whether and how much to bid for the opportunity to show an ad. Critically, PII such as email address or phone number are never shared or transferred in ad requests, or outside of the match operation.

Equally important is that thanks to label encryption, OPJA allows the hiding of information about which individual users are in the audience intersection from both the advertiser and the publisher. This reduces data leakage between advertisers and publishers, and enables remarketing without requiring user tracking. Fundamentally, it’s an approach that adheres to the data minimization and purpose limitation principles of privacy by design.

Privacy Enhancing Technologies

OPJA outlines two approaches enabling the matching of user PII data in the multi-vendor setting, and they’re both based on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs). The first is a purely software based, delegated private set intersection. This method enables the comparison of encrypted datasets using commutative encryption, without decrypting the data. The delegated helper server cannot decrypt the match data and is used merely to execute data comparison and generate encrypted data for activation. Additional trust in the helper server could be provided through hardware provided remote attestation.

The second approach is based on hardware provided Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs). This method ensures that match data is encrypted exclusively for the secure processing hardware provided by a helper server.

The use of PETs offers a robust foundation from which trust between vendors regarding how user data is matched can be achieved. OPJA matching requires that the data remains protected with encryption during processing, through a combination of cryptography software and TEE hardware. This greatly reduces the number of things that vendors and service providers need to trust each other with.

OPJA’s matching approaches are also not theoretically limited to a single cloud or infrastructure environment. These characteristics make PETs based approaches great as matching interoperability candidates in the multi-vendor setting.

Learn More

You can read the OPJA specification as well as the IAB Tech Lab Data Clean Room Guidelines here. Additionally, here's the Tech Lab's latest announcement on the 1.0 spec release.

For a fun introduction to OPJA, check out Digiday’s excellent WTF is IAB Tech Lab’s Open Private Join and Activation?

For a simple walkthrough on how commutative encryption can be used to enable double blind matching (not specific to OPJA), have a look at the little explainer here.

Integrate

If you’re a data or ad tech vendor (SSP, DSP, ad server) interested in interoperating with the Optable data collaboration platform using OPJA, we’d love to hear from you. Drop us an email.

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Finally, it’s our hope that OPJA is a catalyst for future open proposals associated with measurement, audience modelling, and other use cases that involve the sharing of sensitive user data between advertisers and publishers.

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As third-party cookies and other public personal identifiers die a slow death, digital advertising is crying out for a new and better approach to replace them. To fill the void, data clean rooms are increasingly being recognised as the answer, with advertisers seeking a solution that delivers actionable data within a privacy-safe framework.

However, their success, like the efficiencies and scale they offer, depends on their ability to link systems, platforms, and partners. This makes delivering a frictionless approach critical for the growth of data clean rooms.     

Creating frictionless partnerships

So why are data clean rooms seen as the saviour of digital advertising? It’s because they can power the whole advertising process, from delivering insights to campaign planning, activating, targeting, and measuring.

At the heart of a data clean room approach are partnerships: between advertisers, publishers, data providers and vendors. Ensuring successful partnerships can flourish requires frictionless collaboration that works on two levels. Firstly, the partnership level, with publishers and advertisers coming together to work with whoever they choose and linking seamlessly in a secure, privacy-complaint environment.

Secondly, the technology level, by allowing data clean rooms to connect easily with any relevant third-party platform. After all, companies want to avoid frustrations around time-consuming, bespoke implementations or the inability of platforms to interact every time they seek to engage in a partnership.

So while security, privacy and compliance are central to data clean rooms, they must remove the barriers that stifle this collaboration.

That’s because there are huge inherent benefits in creating data clean rooms that allow parties to collaborate directly, irrespective of the platforms they use. It’s why we’ve focused effort and resources from the start on building our technology so users can create data clean rooms then quickly execute partnerships by inviting businesses to connect without the other party needing to be a user of our platform. Real value is gained by offering an easy solution for achieving this platform-agnostic collaboration. 

The future is interoperability 

Ultimately, any technology must be an enabler that eradicates complexity. For data clean rooms, this comes down to interoperability.

Ensuring platforms can connect and communicate with each other removes the friction around companies cooperating. Whether it’s integrating with other data clean rooms or collaborating with partners without their data having to leave their data warehouse, interoperability marks the next phase of building a frictionless environment.  

The whole point of interoperability is that it requires consensus. Time and again in ad tech, fragmentation and silos have hindered the ability of a market to evolve and prosper. However, we’re seeing the industry begin to tackle this with the IAB Tech Lab currently working on drafting a set of data clean room standards. This is a recognition of the importance of data clean rooms and represents an essential starting point for interoperability, because it’s through agreed standards that this becomes possible.

 With more businesses looking to test data clean rooms, central to their success is ensuring it’s easy to establish partnerships and that technologies are mutually compatible. Ultimately, taking down the barriers, removing friction, fostering collaboration, and embedding interoperability means data clean rooms can fulfil their potential and support the future needs of the digital advertising industry.

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To work the way they should, data clean rooms need to bring a fluid, real-time, embeddable infrastructure to data collaboration. And at the heart of such an offering, there needs to be an API that allows any client to deploy the data clean room approach across any inventory, any type of audience data and any third-party cloud provider.

In this way, any third-party application or platform should be able to benefit from a data clean room by embedding its API for secure, privacy-preserving data collaboration. 

This in turn enables a complete digital media workflow via API, and taking Optable’s service as an example, it looks like this: 

1. Collecting data at the edge. The API is wrapped in our SDKs for iOS, Android and web to enable this, but it can be done for virtually any other platform.
2. Creating audiences from data onboarded in the platform, whether it’s from traits or available identifiers.
3. Enriching a device graph by feeding identifier associations and user attributes.
4. Creating a data clean room and inviting a partner to match with an audience.
5. Executing a match with the partner by using our open-source matching library and command-line utility that implements various PSI protocols. 
6. Ultimately, all of this is done in order to enable analytics and straight-line activation. Both of these functions are available via API as well. 

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One of the best applications of a data clean room API is in combination with a customer data platform (CDP). An API can be used to properly leverage audience data housed in a CDP, making this data actionable for activation and measurement with third parties. 

Another good example involves walled garden data and inventory. Whether it’s for CTV, audio or traditional web formats, an API can be used to effectively drive advertiser performance anchored in real customer data. 

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Ultimately, the API is here to make it easy to leverage the data clean room approach in any third party platform or application. 

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The culling of the cookie. Increasing consumer awareness. The realization that third-party data isn’t all that effective. All these factors have slowly but surely driven advertisers to implement alternative targeting solutions.

One such alternative is data clean rooms (DCRs).

The problem is that while they are a viable solution, most traditional DCRs still operate as third-party databases, meaning that users have little to no control over what is being done with their data.

The solution? A new generation of privacy-preserving data collaboration software has emerged that is able to provide advertisers with DCRs that measure and match overlaps in data - all without infringing user privacy.

But why should the industry pay attention, and what are the benefits of leveraging this new software?
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1. A purpose-limited environment for advertisers

The key here is the phrase ‘purpose-limited.’ These privacy-preserving DCRs are created with advanced cryptography that minimizes data leakage, providing a purpose-limited environment for advertisers in which to work. 

This means users have to explicitly consent to their data being used for things such as analysis, activation or measurement. 

Since these DCRs are limited to the purposes for which the users have consented, they not only give advertisers an opportunity to analyze, activate and measure data - but also to protect the privacy and sovereignty of user data. 
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2. Maximum collaboration opportunities for publishers 

Next-generation DCRs stand out for their frictionless collaboration and interoperability capabilities.

In Optable’s case, for instance, only one side of the match needs to be the company’s customer - the other partner can be from any organization, opening up much wider opportunities for collaboration.

The only thing the publisher needs to do is create an identity graph. Once this is set up, they can start collaborating with a number of different partners.

Publishers can invite these partners to join the DCR by either:

1. utilizing Optable’s open source utility to encrypt their data at source, regardless of the system it sits in - and executing a multi-party computational protocol with their own data set
2. working with other industry partners such as cloud data warehouses, to allow brands using their services to leverage the DCR without their data ever leaving the data warehouse.
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3. Adapting to everchanging consent statuses

A key stand-out for this new breed of DCRs is their ability to collect and push out data in real time.

As well as leveraging privacy-enhancing technologies, DCRs such as Optable have also built real-time programmatic workflows around these technologies. This means they are not only purpose-limited, but are also able to keep up with users’ changing consent statuses.

If, for example, a user who has consented to analytics withdraws that consent at a later stage, Optable is able to gather that information in real time and remove the user from a clean room immediately.
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4. Activating data on both the buy-side and sell-side 

By using our ‘data collaboration nodes’, we can ensure that data sets from different partners are physically decentralized from one another. This means, for instance, ensuring that data from the buy-side and sell-side is never merged, and stays inherently separate within the clean room.

Audiences can still be activated and targeted directly outside of the clean room, but none of the data is pushed into the open bitstream or connected to a third-party ID - ultimately preserving the integrity of the DCR.

This is important as it means that brands are able to activate and measure their data - on both sides of the coin - without compromising on privacy standards.
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5. Privacy-centric activation 

As well as activating data, brands can also schedule data matches with partners to look at the overlap between publisher data and advertiser data, for example. These create a matched audience over time that brands can analyze to gain useful insights into their customers, enabling them to target them more effectively.

These insights can include specific traits within a customer base that a brand or advertiser might not have known about their audience before. And this can all be done without ever pushing any of the data out of the DCR.

Our publishers, advertisers and brands can effectively send in first-party cookies (and other non-matchable first-party identifiers) that we use to produce a key value. This is then pushed directly back into Google Ad Manager or any other ad server. This allows publishers to invite advertisers into their own DCR without the data leaving its original source - all the while being able to activate campaigns and target their first-party data.

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In the age of cookieless, Optable provides customers with a powerful privacy-preserving tool that can match publishers to advertisers and activate audiences in real time. Request a demo today and see how our DCR technology can help you collaborate with ease.

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Photo by Timon Studler on Unsplash

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Far from being competitive, data clean rooms and customer data platforms are complementary. If you’re serious about maximising the value of your audience data and digital advertising, you need both.

Traditionally, when it came to managing data and building advertising audience segments, particularly for online acquisition, Data Management Platforms (DMPs) ruled the roost. But things are changing.

While DMPs mainly rely on third-party data to build audiences, increasing privacy legislation and the dismantling of third-party cookies and device identifiers mean cultivating and harnessing first-party data is now critical. And, in addition to acquisition, retention, engagement and personalisation are now key focuses as brands tackle changing customer journeys that are non-linear, fluid and fragmented.

Additionally, shifts to identity-based experiences - dealing with multiple forms of dynamic identity and recognising individuals’ myriad connected devices, emails and other identifiers - require new approaches to managing this complexity. The result is that CDPs have come to the fore.

These allow data supply chains to be connected and the data normalised, providing a centralised, real-time source of truth that enables publishers and brands to gain data sovereignty and deliver effective data strategies.
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‍Unlocking the value of data

As publishers and brands wrestle with the changes occurring in the digital advertising environment and address the loss of traditional data signals by bolstering their first-party data, simply collecting, collating, controlling, safeguarding and managing the data isn’t enough. What’s also critical is amplifying its value to deliver effective data-driven advertising and achieving this relies on partnerships.   

In a perfect world, the many CDPs available today would employ the same standards and be built on open-source software so their users could easily partner with the customers of any other CDP. But we don’t live in a perfect world, and this is where DCRs - or, to describe them more accurately, Data Collaboration Platforms (DCPs) - play a crucial role.

Today, successful advertising is only possible through direct collaboration with partners, be they publishers, brands, or agencies.

DCRs act as middleware, allowing users to facilitate secure data connections with trusted partners to capitalise on the value of data in delivering personalised advertising, while maintaining security and privacy – all without putting personally identifiable information at risk.

In this way, DCRs unleash the value of first-party data, turning it into a competitive advantage for the data owner. For advertisers, this means achieving better results from ad campaigns by activating their data and measuring success. For publishers, it means leveraging the value of their own first-party data to allow advertisers to deliver more effective advertising, without exposing it through the bidstream or identity graph.   

It’s not just about connectivity. DCRs must achieve this in a frictionless manner, so users can collaborate with any partner they choose. 

Closed systems stifle collaboration. A true DCR offers interoperability, flexibility and ease of use, utilising open-source, decentralised approaches so users can create rooms and invite parties to collaborate directly, irrespective of the platform they are using.

In a cluttered advertising ecosystem, DCRs must remove complexity and make the whole process - from inviting collaboration and data onboarding, through to activating it and measuring success - simple and quick. Essentially, they become the mechanism for leveraging the first-party data stored in a CDP.

That’s why we developed our solution: to remove barriers, facilitate easy collaboration and provide a frictionless, platform-agnostic approach to delivering the data-driven digital advertising of the future. 
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Don’t think one or the other

So when it comes to debates around CDPs vs. DCRs, it’s not a question of either/or, but both. 

As first-party data and IDs replace the old ways of doing things, CDPs are essential for managing the data complexities. However, advertising success centres on connecting this data with other partners. It’s independent DCRs, like Optable, that provide this critical frictionless collaboration environment so the data can be activated and its value realised, for the benefit of the whole industry. 

DCRs and CDPs play crucial but different roles in fixing today’s broken ecosystem and helping tie everything together. So if you think, ‘Do I really need a DCR if I have a CDP?’ - the answer is a definitive ‘Yes’.

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During lockdown, with Covid raging outside, those with the opportunity to do so turned to their gardens, treating them as sanctuaries, lavishing them with care and attention and cultivating what they could. 

And at about the same time, the ongoing eradication of public identifiers was inspiring a comparable new strategy for publishers. Edged out of the third-party-data-driven world they knew - but which had never really played to their strengths - they busied themselves creating their own walled gardens, their own content fortresses.

What have they grown? More personal data, more insights and a much deeper connection to their audiences - a connection anchored in consent. Publishers’ first-party data is private, relevant, hugely detailed and engaging, and so, like anything built with care and attention, these sanctuaries have a very real value to those they invite in.
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Your data meets mine in a data clean room

First-party publisher data is manna for brands, and especially those who have been carefully tending their own data gardens. Google has found that brands using their own first-party data for key marketing functions achieved up to 2.9X revenue uplift and 1.5X increase in cost savings.

When brands work with publishers to mix their data and build relevant segments and publisher cohorts, the effect is equally compelling: The Guardian last year reported a 65% higher than average brand lift for brands using its first-party data. Wherever you look, the effect of first-party publisher data is emphatic.

However, at every step, old habits need to be questioned. For publishers, the best way to amplify the value of that data has always been to connect it to brands, but for all the obvious reasons, that can’t happen over public programmatic pipes anymore. 

Instead, the most efficient, effective, privacy-safe way for publishers to make their private data available for analytics and activation is through a new, proper, data clean room-enabled infrastructure. 

The proportion of publisher inventory that transits through clean rooms - what we call clean room media - is growing, as brands and publishers realise in unison that their old channels are drying up and new ones are needed.
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We’ve been here before - only different

In fact, the shift is uncannily reminiscent of the old programmatic revolution - the very architecture the new privacy-conscious world is now working to replace. Just like clean room media, programmatic started small and ended up huge, as the scale of the opportunity - and the opportunity cost of ignoring it - became apparent. 

But clean room media is many leaps ahead of the old programmatic free-for-all, in that it allows publishers to easily monetize their newly available audience data in a safe, privacy-preserving way. And it gives brands bespoke data - better than anything they might have found in the old marketplace. 

So brands get what they need: more precision and performance through exclusively available audience data, while leveraging the data they’ve been carefully collecting and enriching in their own CDPs.

Publishers, meanwhile, get the reward for the deep, private, inimitable relationships they have developed with their users.

And, crucially, in this new ecosystem, consumers get more control and more privacy protection than ever before.
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Exponential growth of clean room media

One publisher that uses Optable has seen its share of clean room media increase six-fold over the past few months, and it’s expected to continue growing exponentially.

So, just because programmatic is yesterday’s technology, does not mean that the technology of tomorrow shouldn’t adopt its trajectory.

Before outstaying their welcome, third-party cookies gave us the very worthwhile expectation of openness, interoperability and ease of use - all attributes of clean room media.

In the same way, tomorrow’s data solutions need to echo the revolutionary, problem-solving qualities that made programmatic the success it was - only with the addition of privacy, exclusivity, a better deal for brands and publishers and a renegotiated consumer contract.

As clean room media continues to grow as a category, it’s exciting to see more and more publishers and brands adopt this new way of transacting.

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