Data Strategy and Monetization at CBC/Radio-Canada

Data Clean Rooms (DCRs) have recently taken the digital marketing industry by storm. More than another passing fad though, the interest stirred by DCRs is grounded in their promise to solve two interconnected challenges facing digital marketers, namely the expanding regulatory frameworks protecting online privacy (GDPR in Europe, CCPA in California, and soon C-27 in Canada) and the progressive deprecation of cookies and mobile IDs as the foundation of content and ad personalization.

DCRs’ providers promise to solve these two problems at once by offering a secured cloud-based platform through which brands can leverage each other's first-party data without revealing its content.

Take a simple yet common use case. An advertising publisher (e.g. CIO Review Magazine) and one of its advertising clients (any brand advertising here) can, through a DCR, find the overlap between their respective user base and activate this shared segment on some ad server to display the client’s ads any time one of their members visit www.cioreview.com. The secured match that creates this overlapping audience is not based on cookies, but rather using a hashed identifier such as an email address. The overlapping user base can then be refined by using any other data points held by either partner, without their content being revealed to the other: a publisher can thus improve the campaign by using some interest data it holds  for example, interest in business as a topic, while the advertiser can refine the campaign based on some other data point they possess like household income.

Most importantly, partners can thus leverage each other’s user-level data without seeing or obtaining any of it (at most, the publisher can see a list of hashed IDs to be activated). Even with regard to high-level insights, both parties are typically in control of what data they wish to share. Whereas cookie-based campaigns made marketers dependent on signals they did not own or control.

DCR technology empowers them to act as true custodians of their first-party data. The technology behind DCRs is not entirely new, but the current industry transformation has created the ideal environment for it to emerge as a key addition to the digital marketer toolkit.

  There is no doubt that all brands engaged in digital marketing will need to adapt to DCRs with some urgency to become more privacy-compliant and less cookie-dependent  

While DCRs are best known for this activation use case, their potential value does not end there. First, they can improve campaign reporting, both upstream (media planning) and downstream (campaign effectiveness and ROI). Although no sensitive data is shared between the respective DCRs of the publisher and the advertiser, both partners can still benefit from the aggregated data insights: in order, for instance, to explore the composition of their overlap audience, analyze campaign attribution across different platforms, or to measure with more accuracy the reach of targeted campaigns accurately.

Another benefit of DCRs is the possibility to use them as a springboard and channel for brand collaborations. Unfortunately, in my opinion, too little attention is paid to this benefit. Let me explain. Under the standard (cookie-based) digital marketing framework, brands can address blind spots in their first-party data by developing second-party ‘deals’ with other brands having particularly rich datasets in the underserved category. For example, a grocery chain with little finance-related data could enter into a second-party data deal with a credit card company and thereby leverage the latter's cookies to target users in a certain income bracket. This whole arrangement, however, is (1) based on signals (cookies) that are (1) fading out and (2) flawed because short-lived and tied to a browsing session rather than an actual person. DCRs offer a new platform for such data partnerships. This platform can not only survive what is often called (not quite accurately) the coming cookie apocalypse, but improve the privacy and quality of the data exchange. The ability to use persistent identifiers will improve the accuracy of targeted campaigns, and the ability to leverage this data for campaigns without actually seeing it will improve user privacy. 

Data clean rooms are not a mere marketing buzzword or a passing fad, but that’s not to say they offer a silver bullet to all our privacy and addressability needs. There is no doubt that all brands engaged in digital marketing (i.e. essentially all of them…) will need to adapt, with some urgency, to become more privacy-compliant and less cookie-dependent. I strongly believe that DCRs will play a key role to face these challenges, but the problem is complex and digital marketers will need to keep abreast of a wide range of emerging resources beyond DCRs, from universal identifiers to consent management platforms and contextual targeting. DCRs should thus be regarded as an important, though not exclusive, resource in the new data-driven marketing toolbox.