As cookie deprecation closes in on third-party data, the advertising industry must find new ways to approach audience targeting. In search of better-performing identity graphs, advertisers and publishers are beginning to join forces. 

Clean room methodology allows for more secure data collaboration, providing one possible solution. In the context of TV advertising, clean rooms offer privacy-compliant software that enables advertisers and publishers to match user-level data without actually sharing any personal information or raw data with one another. 

It’s not a question of if the US will follow in the footsteps of the EU’s GDPR, but when. Here’s how advertisers can use data clean rooms to reach target audiences while respecting their privacy, how publishers and media partners can use first-party data to increase the value of their inventory and how both sides can come together to future-proof advertising. 

Advertisers: Reach consumers with privacy-safe audience targeting

Many advertisers have a tremendous amount of first-party information from their own website visitors, intending customers, previous sales and “clicks” from more traditional digital campaigns. But extending those insights beyond the walls of owned and operated channels and using them to find likely customers in the advanced TV space requires more data. 

By using data clean room technology, advertisers can partner with publishers to gain insights on advanced TV audiences, target likely customers and reduce ad waste. Tapping into data clean rooms with multiple publishers and measurement partners also allows advertisers to efficiently discover cross-platform media that reaches target audiences, no matter how they’re watching, with a blend of compliantly sourced data that transcends fragmentation. 

On the back end, advertisers can also use data clean rooms to analyze broader advanced TV campaign performance against specific audience segments, achieving cross-platform attribution within particular swaths of consumers. 

Extending the power of first-party data by blending it with other privacy-safe data from the advanced TV ecosystem drives a deeper understanding of audience behavior and media impact in the channel, informing continual optimization for how to best reach customers in the space. 

Prepare the digital media industry for the post-cookie world

Data clean rooms are one way around a dying resource. As third-party cookies prepare to make their final goodbye on Google Chrome, and a variety of tech platforms and states introduce their own data privacy regulations, publishers and advertisers need to get ahead of the changes.

Clean rooms provide one approach to this impending obstacle, offering safe spaces that match points across multiple data sets to generate analysis and extract additional value from existing collections of consumer information. This technology will evolve to better serve digital advertising’s value chain as the ecosystem responds to signal loss and legal crackdowns on privacy infractions in coming years. 

As both sides of the digital ad industry work toward more security and standardization, advanced TV is a channel where clean rooms can power the data collaboration needed to overcome fragmentation and achieve reliable cross-platform reach, attribution and shoppability past the third-party cookie.

“On TV & Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video.