‘Clean rooms’ spell brighter future for social media advertising
‘Clean rooms’ – sharing arrangements that give platforms and advertisers a safe space to couple their proprietary data – are being heralded as the solution to working in a market of walled gardens.
Advertisers, limited by choice in a market dominated by a handful of big players and where data tends to be under lock and key, are looking for workarounds to some of the drawbacks to using social media platforms to deliver ads.
“We’re operating with a lot of networks that are essentially walled gardens, and while they have a lot of data, there’s plenty they don’t share,” said Dino Myers-Lamptey, UK Managing Director of Mediahub, during a Mediatel and 4C debate last week.
“The problem means there’s a lack of cross-channel visibility.”
Myers-Lamptey added that networks such as Facebook and Google were so large that advertisers “don’t have much choice about whether they use them or not.”
However, given the walls are not coming down, some advertising bosses are looking for different solutions, including the use of so-called ‘clean rooms’ – an idea that tentatively reared its head late last year.
“Clean rooms give us the opportunity to join the dots across touchpoints,” said Ryan Storrar, SVP Head of Media Activation, EMEA, Essence, part of GroupM.
“I’m very optimistic about what’s in the pipeline.”
However, for clean rooms to work effectively, the industry must persuade the likes of Facebook, Amazon and others, to enable the data flow into them. “We need to be able to run independent measurements and take actions off a source of truth,” Storrar said.
Although it is still early days, last month agency sources told Ad Age that Amazon is set to blend data and marketing with the help of clean rooms.
The technology – still undergoing trials – is being investigated as Amazon develops data and analytics tools, supported by machine learning and cloud computing.
Meanwhile, a limited number of advertisers and agencies are tapping into impression-level Facebook campaign delivery data through similar technology. AdExchanger reported last year that the safe spaces were allowing insights to be derived from Facebook data that can be coupled with an advertiser’s first-party data for attribution, measurement and modelling purposes.
Storrar and Goldman
Last week, Storrar said the current system of walled gardens was “limiting” and that the siloing of measurement was a clear challenge. “We want to be able to tie things together in a much more holistic way,” he said.
Storrar also wants to be able to control frequency exposure across multiple platforms, and is now looking to technology and partnerships to achieve this long-running goal for advertisers.
“A lot of the limitations that come from the concept of walled gardens lead to [issues such as ad blocking, brand safety and fraud].”
Storrar’s comments came as advertising bosses looked at the future of social media advertising more generally. The positive reaction to the clean room solution prompted other experts to call for a shift in attitudes to social media, which have faced a raft of issues in recent years.
“In general, we spend too much time on what we cannot do rather than what we can do with these platforms,” said Aaron Goldman, CMO at 4C.
“Of course we must address the challenges, but we also should not forget what’s available through these platforms – building brands or driving performance; there are incredible opportunities that are not available on other channels.”
Goldman added that it was important to keep the focus for 2019 on the strengths of social media. “If, as an industry, we can stop spending so much time attacking the weaknesses, then I think we will find ourselves in a place where ultimately we’re able to deliver better experiences for advertisers and users.”