Five key takeaways on data clean room collaboration from Cannes Lions

Earlier this summer, Amazon Web Services (AWS) hosted a series of events and meetings with hundreds of customers and partners at Cannes Lions. Data clean rooms was a popular topic amongst these conversations, as advertisers and marketers are increasingly looking to future-proof their approach to more securely collaborating with their partners on their collective datasets. Here are some key takeaways from conversations related to privacy-enhanced data collaboration and AWS Clean Rooms.

AWS Clean Rooms team at Amazon Port at Cannes Lions: Akram Chetibi, Matt Miller, and Shaila Mathias

Takeaway #1: Investing in privacy-enhanced data collaboration is a top-of-mind topic for advertising and marketing leadership.

At Cannes Lions, AWS hosted tens of dozens of meetings, and privacy-enhanced collaboration was a key topics amongst leaders. During one meeting AWS had the chance to sit down for a video interview with one of our customers, Amy Leifer, Chief Advertising Sales Officer at DIRECTV, to discuss how she approaches collaborating with her customers. “With privacy regulations changing, it becomes even more critical to be able to partner [with] advertisers and meet them where they need to be met,” explained Leifer. “They have first-party data, or they need to use third-party data, and how do we do that in a really safe and trusted privacy and compliant way?” These types of conversations were common at Cannes Lions as marketers are looking to unlock more insights for their advertising without revealing underlying data. The following is Amy Leifer’s interview.

Takeaway #2: Both the buy and sell side of advertising are interested in data clean rooms for driving insights and measurement on their advertising.

AWS hosted a panel entitled “Accelerating privacy-enhanced collaboration with AWS” that was moderated by Akram Chetibi, the General Manager of AWS Clean Rooms, and featured three customers: Annalect, Ampersand, and Nielsen.

In this panel, Adam Gitlin, President of Annalect, shared that, “[our clients] see clean rooms as an opportunity to add an additional layer of protection to managing their first-party data, and then also opportunities in measurement with the deprecation of digital signals. They see clean rooms technologies as a way to help augment the loss of measurement through access to datasets that you can no longer get. And in fact what we’re seeing is using clean rooms technology unlocks access to even more valuable data than what you could get before.

“What’s great about talking to clients and partners both in this area is that it’s not a conversation about how to limit capability through better protection. It’s actually a win-win. You get better protection and enhanced capabilities because there’s more confidence in what happens with the data.”

Marketers and their partners, such as media publishers, want to collaborate and AWS Clean Rooms helps them more easily and securely collaborate and analyze their collective datasets—without sharing or copying one another’s underlying data.

Watch “Accelerating privacy-enhanced collaboration with AWS”.

Takeaway #3: Augmenting first- party data—in a privacy-enhanced way—is critical for advertisers to generate insights.

With the evolving privacy landscape, marketers are changing the way they view and activate on first-party data. AWS Clean Rooms helps advertisers expand and enrich audience profiles in their first-party data with external data sources more easily and securely.

Using AWS Clean Rooms, Andrew Ward, President of Ampersand, elaborated that, “we’ve been able to federate and harmonize the single largest source of deterministic TV data in the marketplace through our ownership and affiliate partnership structure. The reason we like the opportunity that we’ve got going with AWS is to create an environment where we can leverage that data and those insights in a privacy-compliant way. [AWS] protects not only the first-party brand data, but also our set top box and viewership insights that we glean from both linear and streaming environments.”

AWS interviewed Ampersand’s Justin Rosen, SVP of Data and Analytics, where he shared, “I think the exciting thing about what AWS Clean Rooms has to offer is that it provides a balance of transparency with flexibility for first-party data owners.”

AWS Clean Rooms customers can use their first-party data to collaborate with partners on their collective datasets in order to plan and execute audience-based campaigns more securely, without a reliance on perishable identifiers. Watch the full interview with Justin Rosen.

Takeaway #4: Brands are looking for ways to better understand their large volumes of data to measure and optimize their marketing.

Common use cases for marketers to use data clean rooms are improving campaign planning, activation, and measurement, while offering better, more relevant consumer experiences. Deirdre Thomas, Chief Product Officer at Nielsen, explained in the “Accelerating privacy-enhanced collaboration with AWS” panel that, “what our clients are trying to accomplish is not actually new. They want to understand where to find their audience. Is their plan working effectively? How do they optimize it? Where should they spend money? What content should they produce? Where should they put it? How should they monetize it?

“Those have always been the questions that our industry seeks to answer. What’s changed really is the world is digital now, which opens up a wealth of possibilities with the explosion of the amount of data. Ultimately the challenge is how marketers can] do it in a way that allows me to be customer and privacy first.”

With AWS Clean Rooms, customers can take advantage of their data by bringing together disparate datasets from across engagement channels and partner platforms. This helps to plan campaigns securely, segment and activate audiences, and measure and attribute campaign performance—all without sharing underlying data. Advertisers, media publishers, and their partners can expand their access to data as they create, deliver, and measure personalized advertising experiences for customers.

Akram Chetibi, General Manager of AWS Clean Rooms, speaks with AWS customers Annalect, Ampersand, and Nielsen at the “Accelerating privacy-enhanced collaboration with AWS” panel at Cannes Lions.

Takeaway #5: Business and technical users are interested in simplifying their approach to clean rooms.

AWS met with hundreds of business leaders at Cannes Lions, and many conversations led to the insight that in addition to technical teams, business teams also wanted to use data clean rooms to solve for their collaboration use cases.

That’s why we were excited to announce that Habu launched a new solution for AWS Clean Rooms at Cannes Lions combining its interoperable clean room orchestration and automation platform with AWS Clean Rooms. Habu’s new solution makes it easier for business users to generate insights when collaborating with their partners on their collective datasets.

In Habu’s press release, Co-Founder & CEO Matt Kilmartin said, “In order to enable data-driven brands to achieve more precise targeting and effective measurement, the need for increased data accessibility is paramount. We are excited to share the news of our partner solution leveraging AWS Clean Rooms. This solution aims to deliver secure, seamless, and automated collaboration solutions to accelerate mutually beneficial business growth for brands and their trusted partners.”

This solution helps business personas with a simplified solution to solve for key marketing use cases such as audience insights, activation, measurement, and attribution—all while better protecting their data.

About AWS Clean Rooms

AWS Clean Rooms helps companies and their partners more easily and securely analyze and collaborate on their collective datasets—without sharing or copying one another’s underlying data. With AWS Clean Rooms, customers can create a secure data clean room in minutes, and collaborate with any other company on the AWS Cloud to generate unique insights about advertising campaigns, investment decisions, and research and development.

The AWS Clean Rooms team is continually building new features to help customers collaborate. Watch this video to learn more about privacy-enhanced collaboration with AWS Clean Rooms.

Check out more AWS Partners or contact an AWS Representative to know how we can help accelerate your business.

Additional Resources

• AWS Clean Rooms Now Generally Available — Collaborate with Your Partners without Sharing Raw Data
• AWS On Air episode, featuring AWS Clean Rooms – Now Generally Available
• Introducing AWS for Advertising & Marketing: Helping customers reinvent the industry with purpose-built services, solutions, and partners
• Introducing four new solutions that help customers integrate AWS Clean Rooms into their advertising workflows
• AWS Clean Rooms User Guide