AWS Announces Data Clean Rooms - A Ground for Shared Data Analytics and Insights

As part of Amazon’s new AWS for Advertising and Marketing initiative, it has launched a new service of Data Clean Rooms.

Data clean rooms are secured and highly protected environments through which companies can share aggregated second-party data. It supports the matching of two or more data sets in a transparent way, without inadvertently revealing personally identifiable information or PII. With the end of third-party cookies near us, data clean rooms provide a safe and viable alternative for organizations to collaborate and gather credible data signals from trusted sources. This helps organizations to further augment their first-party data sets.

According to AWS CEO Adam Selipsky, clean rooms are cumbersome to build, and once built it may require continuous maintenance or updation of data, all while meeting new requests for collaborations.

With AWS Clean Rooms companies can:

“A company that has a customer’s loyalty data, for example, could collaborate with another that has data on a user’s ad-clicking behavior to create new insights into a user’s behavior, all without ever sharing that user’s raw and identifiable data. With these insights, we can produce even more relevant ads while maintaining privacy for everyone to get started,” said Selipsky in his statement.

With AWS Clean Rooms, advertisers, publishers, and marketers can seek new ways to interoperate with their partners and collaborate to acquire enhanced customer insights. It will help businesses to innovate in areas like campaign planning, targeting, activation, measurement, reporting, and more.

Given the looming data privacy concerns and the eventual crumble of cookies, first-party data has already become a high-priority mission for marketers. Fueled further by this trend, the growing interest in privacy-preserving data collection efforts has resulted in the proliferation of data clean room providers.

Google Ads Data Hub, Amazon Marketing Cloud, Snowflake, Disney, and Habu are some of the prominent data clean room providers as of now in the market. And now with the recent addition of AWS, the list keeps growing.

This is good news for marketers, because the more diverse the options, the easier it is for them to adopt the most suitable data clean rooms for their unique business cases or requirements.

However, when evaluating the right provider, it’s best to check if the clean room is cloud and identity-agnostic. That means that it should enable businesses to match customer data with a partner’s data using any common key such as pseudonymized identifiers. Besides, it must allow them to understand and share data across organizations anywhere on the cloud and not lock into a single infrastructure. Additionally, data protection and security are also of utmost importance.

When it comes to AWS Clean Rooms, though it is based on AWS Cloud, it can ingest data from where it lives using the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) bucket, and the output is delivered to the same location.

All in all, data clean rooms are not a magic bullet for data analytics and privacy challenges. Nevertheless, they provide the grounds for much-needed interoperability and collaboration of data in the absence of third-party cookies. This technology is playing a major role in the shift to a privacy-conscious marketing ecosystem. And, early adopters are poised to lead the charge.