Clean rooms will help data-driven TV into a new era, says LiveRamp

We are approaching an inflection point in data-driven TV advertising when many more advertisers will use the medium and justify their spending with deterministic business outcomes measurement.

That is the view of Tim Norris-Wiles, international expansion at LiveRamp Clean Room, who notes the migration of digital-native performance advertisers into TV. “The data has never been more ready, and the participants [media buyers, media owners and retail data suppliers] have never been more motivated,” he declares.

“We are seeing deep ‘verticalisation’ of insights and media, sometimes tailored to specific sectors like automotive and travel. There is also an increase in the number and diversity of TV advertisers. It is the perfect melting pot.”

He uses the Sky Media partnership with Regit as an example of such “verticalisation”. Regit is a “digital garage” that helps motorists buy, sell and maintain their vehicles online. It holds data like vehicle ownership (e.g. make, model, age, fuel type, length of ownership) and expiry dates for vehicle servicing, tax, statutory roadworthiness tests and insurance, etc.

Sky Media has been harnessing this data to help automotive advertisers target consumers buying cars or aftersales services.

Automotive data treasure trove

“This is a deterministic, automotive data treasure trove,” Norris-Wiles observes. “Regit does not have television inventory, so it made sense for them to partner with someone that does. Then an OEM [car manufacturer] can bring their conversion data to the table, whether that is a test drive or purchase, and you can connect those signals and prove the full-funnel impact.”

Clean rooms are a key part of this capability, in this case using data from three parties (digital garage data owner, car manufacturer and media owner). “It is verticalised,” Norris-Wiles stresses. “This is a full-funnel automotive advertising product and it is an indicator of what is to come. We will see more verticalisations of the input data, the inventory and the outcomes. I am convinced this will happen in the next 12-24 months.”

Norris-Wiles reckons all brands can exploit data to make their TV advertising stronger. He cites a major home energy provider as an example of a brand with one-to-one customer insights — like boiler ownership, age of boiler and service plan — that could use this knowledge in social media, but once struggled to create deterministic data connections using television. “They want to put that [CRM data] to work in all their channels. They can in TV, now.”

Brands without a one-to-one relationship with consumers (like large consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies) can “borrow” the consumer and purchase signals they need, he points out. They do this by partnering with retail data suppliers.

“The retailers do have a direct relationship with consumers. Retail data is part of the solution for the large CPG advertisers, using data collaboration and clean rooms. CPGs can also go to quick-commerce data providers like Uber Eats, who also know what people have in their basket.”

So, the CPGs can understand who buys different categories of goods, who is a customer and who buys alternative brands, who bought products after watching different media, etc., without knowing them directly.

Charging towards direct outcomes

Norris-Wiles says: “We are charging into a world of direct outcomes measurement [in TV], all the way to purchases. A brand may own the direct sales signals, but these could come from a second party that owns the conversion data. Many retailers work with us to show sales signals that prove the value of media, and they are happy to make money from providing those signals.”

It is smaller, typically digital-native brands (including direct-to-consumer businesses) that are the new growth opportunity for TV today. “A Thinkbox report covering the UK shows there were 932 new advertisers on TV in 2024 and that is because TV provides more opportunities to them thanks to evolving formats and data,” Norris-Wiles reports.

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“We are moving into a new era of television where broadcasters can reach thousands of advertisers, like Meta and Google can, rather than hundreds.

“These new advertisers are coming from video sharing platforms and social media. Subscription businesses are going on TV.

“B2B businesses are part of this growth. I watched a whole ad break recently made up of business software applications like Asana. Brands have an increased ability to understand whether there is an MD or decision maker in a household, for targeting.”

He points out that digital consumer subscription services (think Hello Fresh) tend to operate on low margins. “They are not going to use TV unless they can suppress households that are already customers, as that is a complete waste of money,” he suggests.

Talking about the digital-native advertisers generally, he adds: “The medium may be different for these performance marketers, but their tactics will be the same. And they are not used to proxy measurements like brand lift analytics — they are used to deterministic sales data.”

Norris-Wiles warns that many of the new advertisers have smaller budgets than traditional TV advertisers, but servicing them brings new overhead for media owners, so it is a priority to manage this lower margin business well. He reckons TV providers need to focus on streamlined operations, which includes self-service platforms — something digital-native advertisers will welcome.

Operational streamlining

He views LiveRamp’s Quick Start Insights solution, announced last November, as a contribution to the operational streamlining that will help media owners provide deterministic data links for smaller (and other) businesses. Cleanroom-in-a-box is a simplistic way to describe it. This product is a tool for democratising clean room technology generally, ensuring that more advertisers can harness data collaboration.

Quick Start Insights provides standardised insights in the LiveRamp Clean Room, powered by Habu (the clean room software provider LiveRamp acquired in January 2024, where Norris-Wiles was European MD). LiveRamp says it makes it easier and faster to access and use media performance metrics like audience overlaps, optimal frequency and last-touch attribution from connected TV and other premium publisher data.

Importantly, this product is designed to reduce the heavy workloads often required to collaborate with partners. The toolkit reduces reliance on data science resources substantially, the vendor says, partly by removing the need to write custom code for each query. Quick Start Insights also fast-tracks partnerships with simplified terms and conditions, helping to reduce what can be prolonged periods of negotiation.

Norris-Wiles calls it a clean room on rails, focused on the subset of data queries that are asked most often, and which provide the most value to the media-sales chain.

This tighter focus simplifies the clean room concept. “It is designed to be more accessible than clean rooms that came before and makes this technology available to anyone.

Referring to the approaching inflection point when TV becomes a major performance channel with deterministic business outcomes measurement, Norris-Wiles concludes: “We believe Quick Start Insights is a big ‘solve’ for the next wave of data collaboration”.

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