Using data clean rooms and a CDP to deliver customer 360s

Data collaboration is entering an exciting new era. Data clean rooms are quickly going mainstream, and marketers are beginning to understand the power and limitations of their first-party data.

First-party data has a market value to others and can be improved by sharing it, a feat that can now be done without exposing personally identifiable data (PII) or even the data itself. 

The end of cookies only elevates the need for data collaboration in compliant and secure ways. Marketers still need customer 360s, and the combination of data clean rooms and CDPs can deliver them. The good news is the outcomes will be even better than the old way of collecting data.   

What is a data clean room and why do I care? 

Data clean rooms are not new, but they are becoming more mainstream. A data clean room is a secure, governed framework within which third parties, who may or may not be known to each other or the provider, have agreed to work together using the first-party data of one, some, or all of the participants.

A data clean room allows companies to run queries against other’s data, to share their own, and to analyze sensitive or regulated data without exposing that underlying data.

They eliminate concerns over privacy laws such as GDPR because personally identifiable information (PII) is anonymized, processed, and stored in a compliant way. 

Understanding distributed data clean rooms

Recently, we’ve seen the growing popularity of distributed data clean rooms, based in the cloud, which allow parties to exchange and analyze each other’s data without that data ever having to move from its original location.

Data is shared but de-identified, greatly streamlining both compliance and security burdens, because every time data moves it creates a potential exposure in these areas. 

Not having to move the data also increases operational efficiency as it eliminates the need for time-consuming ETL processes, not to mention the dependency on a data science team, involved in moving data. 

Data producers can monetize their customer data

Why does this matter? Because the marketer’s remit hasn’t changed. Marketers must strive continuously for omnichannel, personalized, and differentiated customer experiences and cannot rely on first-party data alone to consistently deliver that. 

The distributed data clean room combined with a CDP makes possible a critical shift in the marketer mindset: from being a data consumer to becoming a data producer. 

By sharing anonymized data in a clean room environment that may include others in your industry, you can see how others work with that data in ways that can transform how you think about your customers. 

And, while it won’t be the focus of this blog post, the ability to share data in a secure and governed way also opens the door to potentially monetizing your data, which feeds back into the marketing balance sheet to improve the ROI on your spend. Through a data clean room, marketers can control what data comes in, how data in the clean room may be joined to other data in the clean room, what types of analytics can be performed on their data, and what data, if any, can leave the room. 

You can see the possibilities here; not only can you securely access data you could not otherwise, but you can see your own data acted upon in ways that glean new insights for you, too. 

Data clean rooms keep you in control, allowing you to give access only to those parties with your permission. Some global brands have seen value in using distributed data clean rooms (and CDPs) across subsidiaries, divisions, and business units within their own companies.

This means marketing can elevate its status, once again, as a producer of data and insight, not just a consumer. 

The benefits of data clean rooms and your CDP

Beyond these data-specific benefits, data clean rooms, cloud data platforms, and a CDP work together (and integrate with key marketing tools) to enhance the customer experience and empower marketers to innovate and experiment with marketing campaigns and strategies, such as:

Improved segmentation

A brand can connect its CDP to a data clean room to not only anonymize its first-party data but also analyze it alongside third-party sources. It can receive data from the clean room in the form of new customer segments or targeted audiences, all augmented from other anonymized data in the clean room, and feed it back into the marketing platform for activation. 

Marketing campaign analytics at your fingertips

Data clean rooms can also help marketers with measuring campaign effectiveness. While your martech stack can measure the effectiveness of a campaign against itself (first phase vs. second phase, or the latest campaign stats compared with the same one run last quarter), anonymous data sharing can help you see how your campaigns performed against companies targeting similar customers. 

Advanced marketing experimentation and predictive analytics

Distributed data clean rooms allow you to leverage your CDP using live, anonymized data to achieve customer segmentation, explore what-if scenarios such as new segments, and innovate new customer experiences. 

A CDP can only be as innovative as the quality of data put into it. With live data shared anonymously from third parties, your CDP is supercharged with fresh insights to enable advanced audience segmentation and improved predictive modeling. 

Elevating the customer experience

When combined with a cloud-based data warehouse like Snowflake, which can facilitate a distributed data clean room without moving data, we may well find that marketing has leapfrogged past the need for cookies with a secure and governed way to understand customer behaviors and journeys.

As the heart of your first-party data strategy, your CDP becomes an integral part of your data clean room strategy by extension. 

In that ever-relentless pursuit of the 360-degree view of the customer, the CDP is the foundation from which you build customized, personal customer experiences at scale. 

Data clean rooms bring further dimension to that first-party data, providing a critical edge to your marketing efforts as we navigate the current changes to the digital marketing landscape.