Organisations around the world are having to adapt to ever-increasing privacy regulations, with 71% of the world’s population now covered by data protection laws.
While businesses in Europe and the UK have had time to adjust to GDPR and the Data Protection Act, in other parts of the world the situation is more complex. For example, the US is currently partially covered by a patchwork of legislation that varies from state to state, with efforts to bring in federal-level laws taking a backseat to the Presidential election.
When it comes to essential functions such as advertising, companies not only have to adjust to the legal landscape but also a growing tide of consumer awareness. For advertisers and publishers looking to enable effective advertising experiences, these issues demand a new approach. Invasive methods of tracking consumer activity, such as third-party cookies – which are already being significantly impacted by signal loss – must be consigned to history, with legally compliant, ethical processes fit for the privacy-first era put in their place.
The challenge of interoperability
Organisations and marketing departments that are already testing out new ways of connecting with their customers and prospects will recognise that direct collaboration is now more critical than ever. Whether these are simple collaborations made directly between a brand and a publisher, or more complex collaborations with multiple parties – including retail media networks, identity providers, measurement specialists and so on – to work effectively, all partners need to be able to communicate.
Effective advertising collaborations, enabled by interoperability, deliver better outcomes for brands, publishers and consumers. The question is, how can this interoperability be achieved when businesses have such fundamental differences in their tech and data stacks?
This challenge is compounded when you consider that brands and publishers will need to participate in multiple collaborations, and that not every organisation has boundless technical and financial resources. Certainly, with a tech skills gap evident in the UK at the moment, it may be that it’s the marketing department that has to enable these collaborations, rather than IT, meaning any solution must be user-friendly and flexible.
The role of the data clean room
Many organisations looking to address these challenges will have examined data clean rooms. Data clean rooms are secure environments that enable multiple collaborators to work with various data sets without having to share or expose the data itself.
For example, a brand can safely compare its first-party data to a publisher’s addressable audience, all without moving or sharing any underlying data. This would allow them to identify any matches, enabling relevant ads to be served to individuals who appear in both data sets or alternatively, suppress those shared customers and build lookalike audiences to focus efforts on engaging new prospects and expanding their audience reach.
No personally identifying information (PII) is exposed during this process, and there is no risk that the data could be accidentally or deliberately shared with a third party. And if any further parties are involved in the collaboration, the same principles apply. It’s not enough that one partner should not be able to see the raw data of another partner – no party in the collaboration should ever have to move their data from wherever it is stored.
True interoperability is key to the future of advertising
True interoperability that enables quick and successful collaborations that help brandsreach their target customers – and publishers monetise their audience – should be based on agreed-upon standards. When it comes to data clean rooms, organisations must examine the IAB’s common DCR principles to ensure the tool they choose meets interoperability requirements, as well as data privacy laws.
To enable the scenarios described above, not only must the collaboration work with any type, size or format of data, but with any different cloud provider or data warehouse too. It will need to be able to connect with an organisation’s existing tech stack, and in some cases it will also have to connect with another organisation’s own data clean room.
Another critical consideration is the utility of data clean rooms. For efficient and functional collaboration, marketing teams must be able to enable multi-party collaborations quickly, uncover insights that allow them to plan their media campaigns, and effectively measure the outcomes of their campaigns without having advanced data science resources. Interoperability can’t come at the expense of usability.
Interoperability requires a switch in thinking
For advertisers and publishers, getting to grips with interoperability doesn’t mean wholesale changes in the tech stack. Instead, they need to adopt an approach that fits in with both the requirements of the privacy-first era and their ultimate business goals.
With the right strategy and tools, it’s possible to enable interoperability without partners having to share the same cloud, the same data warehouse, or even use the same data taxonomy or common identifier. Quick, efficient, risk-free collaboration is within reach for all organisations – no matter the financial and technical resources they have. The future of advertising hinges on it.
About the Author
Nick Henthorn is SVP Sales, Europe at InfoSum. InfoSum is the world’s leading data collaboration platform and the only secure data clean room, empowering companies to deliver better customer experiences while prioritizing customer privacy. InfoSum enables safe connections between multiple parties to unlock the full potential of their customer data without risk of exposure or misuse. InfoSum not only prioritizes consumer privacy, but enhances it with patented, non-movement of data technology to create the most protected, most connected, and most accessible data collaboration network.
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