
The AdTech industry is buzzing with discussions about cookie deprecation and effective strategies to tackle it. One of the commonly suggested solutions is the utilization of clean rooms alongside responsibly sourced first-party data.
Above all else, the industry recognizes the importance of respecting consumer data and complying with all privacy laws. Additionally, the industry acknowledges the need for a change in our historical practices. This shift benefits everyone involved, as consumer data is more secure than ever. Tremendous investments have been made to ensure the utmost security of consumer information.
Clean rooms are one of the tools that enable companies to use data securely, ensuring the content that you see is as relevant as possible.
Two ways the AdTech industry is addressing cookie deprecation
The days of sending data directly to partners for usage or for using only third-party data for marketing efforts are gone. Now, the emphasis is on responsibly collecting first-party data and using clean rooms to enrich first-party data to enhance marketing efforts.
First-party data
The industry is starting to lean into first-party data gained through transparent means. This valuable information provides organizations with deeper insights into their customers, allowing for more personalized and effective interactions. By embracing the power of first-party data, either on its own or enriched via partner collaboration, you can cultivate stronger relationships, build trust, and deliver tailored experiences that resonate with your customers on a deeper level.
Clean rooms
Many data lakes and warehouses offer this service, ensuring their clients can not only store their data with them but can connect it with other partners in a secure environment and extract more information through the combined data sets versus their data on its own.
Brands and their partners recognize that they need to work together, and a clean room provides a secure environment to share their first-party data without exposing their sensitive data to their partner.
So, while we’re losing third-party cookies, brands and partners can still get value from first-party data by using a clean room to generate audience insights, segmentation strategies, personalized experiences and offers, media plans, and measurement and attribution.
Three ways data clean rooms can improve
Data clean rooms are a great way to facilitate data collaboration while ensuring sensitive data is not exposed.
Data clean rooms are not yet easy to use nor are they inexpensive. They require investment, both financially and resource allocation-wise, and you are not guaranteed to yield great match results. Let’s dive into three areas for data clean room improvement.
High cost
According to the IAB’s State of Data 2023, nearly two-thirds of data clean room users spent at least $200K on the technology in 2022. In addition, one-third of data clean room users expect the price of data clean rooms to rise in 2023. The high cost of this solution can make it inaccessible to smaller companies in the advertising space.
Resource intensive
Nearly half of the companies using data clean rooms have a team of six or more dedicated to the technology, according to the IAB’s State of Data 2023, while nearly a third of companies using data clean rooms have 11 or more employees focused on the technology. Data clean rooms are not turnkey solutions.
Inefficient matching
Even if companies are using clean rooms does not mean that they are automatically going to achieve great success. Identity fragmentation, data hygiene, and differing identifiers can suppress client match rates in clean rooms, leading to significant investment and a lackluster output.
How to get the most return on your clean room investment
The finish line for data collaboration in clean rooms is not just having a relationship with a clean room. Instead, you should incorporate an identity resolution solution in your clean room. By adding an identity solution to your clean room, you can:
- Resolve and match all your identity data, regardless of the identity data that you or your partner have, giving you a larger data foundation to analyze.
- Generate more valuable insights and information, leading to a better experience for your customers.
- Join data sets to create smarter activation and targeting strategies and produce more holistic measurement.
Experian can help you get started with identity resolution and data clean rooms
If you are investing in data clean rooms, that means you are committed to the best in data practices. Experian recommends going the extra step and that you also invest in finding an identity resolution solution. By doing this, you can see better match rates.
Experian offers this capability and has existing relationships with three clean room partners, Amazon Web Services, InfoSum, and Snowflake. In addition to collaborating in clean rooms, we offer collaboration in two other secure environments.
Contact us today to discuss how we enable identity resolution in clean rooms or to chat about our other collaboration capabilities.
Latest posts

Over the past two decades, we’ve seen healthcare become increasingly interconnected. Healthcare systems can share a patient's clinical information in a variety of ways. A Pharmacy Benefits Manager can share it through an Electronic Health Record. An MRI scanner can also capture and store patient images on a picture archiving and communication system (PACS). Despite this wealth of information, according to the CDC, 20 million U.S. citizens don’t have access to medical care when they need it. A patient’s well-being should represent more than their clinical data. How can we increase access to care for those individuals? We can look towards non-clinical factors, like the social determinants of health, for answers. Coordinate care for at-risk patients What if you could identify patients who are likely to readmit due to factors outside of their medical conditions? We can use demographic, geographic, and socioeconomic data to discover patients that need greater access to care. The social determinants of health (SDOH) can uncover factors that may increase the burden of disease for some populations. What are the social determinants of health? They are the conditions in the environments where people are born, live, learn, work, play, worship, and age. Think of factors like safe housing, transportation, job opportunities, and education. These conditions can affect a wide range of health, functioning, and quality-of-life outcomes and risks. What insights can the social determinants of health reveal? Experian Health’s Social Determinants of Health solution offers holistic insight into the financial, transportation, and technological barriers individuals may experience. These barriers could hinder their access to care, medication, food, and housing. It's important to find a solution like ours that offers prioritized, proactive suggestions for interventions that help remove or reduce such barriers for improved health outcomes. Our rich household data sets can provide key insights into the SDOH. This data can answer key questions such as: Are there existing populations with housing instability issues? How much price sensitivity do consumers have for medication? Are there markets or locations that have food instability issues? Is transportation an issue that makes it hard for patients to access care facilities? Are there geographic influences that drive or prevent diagnosis and care? In the chart below, we break down the SDOH into five categories. We outline key considerations that offer insights to provide patient-specific context for your caregivers. Finally, we present patient engagement strategies that are SDOH factor-specific and based on best practice interventions and program types. Social determinants of health data in action While much of healthcare focuses on clinical outcomes, our Consumer View data can provide a wealth of insight into a variety of non-clinical factors that can influence quality of care. A profile of core demographics such as age, ethnicity, and gender can uncover new opportunities or highlight areas where engagement does not align with medical research. We can discover patients at-risk for not being able to access essential services utilizing key, social determinants of health and geographic profiling. When combined with core demographics like age, gender, and ethnicity, we can compare any patient population against expected SDOH norms to uncover significant gaps in access to care. Our data shows that: 1 in 12 households have no access to a vehicle 1 in 4 households are sensitive to the cost of medication 1 in 5 households have very low technology sophistication 1 in 7 households live below the federal poverty level Once you have this data, what can you do with it? You can develop an inclusive education and communication campaign with our data-driven content and contact engagement solution. This solution empowers you to pair the perfect messaging styles with the right channels to deliver a personalized experience to broaden your reach. For those individuals who have little access to technology, an email campaign may not reach them. We can identify additional engagement channels like the traditional newspaper, radio, direct mail, or even broadcast TV to determine the best medium to expand your market while increasing access to care. By using decision making styles and engagement channels, together we can reduce the burden of care on the medically underserved. Let’s drive inclusive healthcare together Develop a more holistic view of your patient population while increasing healthcare equity. We can help you use the social determinants of health for actionable care management. Contact us to learn how you can fold this data into your healthcare ecosystem.

Next up in our Ask the Expert series, we hear from Sarah Ilie and Lauren Portell. Sarah and Lauren talk about the internet’s value exchange – what we gain and lose when it’s so easy to share our information. Is convenience hurting or helping us? The age of connectivity Today, it’s almost unimaginable to think about how your day-to-day life would look without the convenience of the internet, smartphones, apps, and fitness trackers; the list goes on and on. We live in the age of connectivity. We have the convenience to buy products delivered to our homes on the same day. We can consume content across thousands of platforms. We also have watches or apps that track our health with more granularity than ever before. The internet's value exchange In exchange for this convenience and information, we must share various kinds of data for these transactions and activities to take place. Websites and apps give you the option to “opt in” and share your data. They also often let you know that they are collecting your data. This can feel like an uncomfortable proposition and an invasion of privacy to many people. What does it mean to opt-in to a website or app’s tracking cookies? What value do we exchange? What opting in means for you Opting in to cookies means that you are allowing the app or website to track your online activity and collect anonymous data that is aggregated for marketing analytics. The data provides valuable information to understand users better to create better online experiences or offer more useful products and content. Granting access to “tracking” offers several benefits to users such as a customized, more personal user experience or advertising that is more likely to be relevant. For example, let’s imagine you have recently been using an app or website to plan a camping trip. By sharing your data, the website or app has visibility into what is interesting or useful to you which can lead to related content suggestions (best campsites) or relevant advertising and product recommendations (tents and camping equipment). It’s important to know that the marketing data collected when you opt in is extremely valuable. The revenue that advertising generates is often very important to websites and apps because this is how they make money to continue providing content and services to consumers. Data privacy practices Privacy concerns regarding how companies and developers use tracking information have risen over the last couple of years and have resulted in additional protection for consumers’ privacy while still allowing companies to improve their products and advertising. One big step in this direction has been simply making people aware that their data is being collected, why it’s being collected, and providing users with the option to share this data for marketing analytics through opting-in or not. Other important steps to maintain online privacy include formal legal legislation and self-regulation. The right to privacy is protected by more than 600 laws between individual states and federal legislation and the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce recently voted to pass the American Data Privacy and Protection Act. Additionally, marketing organizations such as the Interactive Advertising Bureau and Association of National Advertisers regulate themselves with codes of conduct and standards given there is so much attention on privacy issues. Is the internet's value exchange worth it? The data that we choose to share by opting in has a lot of benefits for us as consumers. There are laws in place to protect our data and privacy. Of course, it’s important to be aware that data is collected and used for marketing purposes, but it’s also reasonable to share a certain amount of data that translates into benefits for you as well. The best data unlocks the best marketing. Contact us to tap into the power of the world’s largest consumer database. Learn how you can use Experian Marketing Services' powerful consumer data to learn more about your customers, drive new business, and deliver intelligent interactions across all channels. Meet the Experts: Lauren Portell, Account Executive, Advanced TV, Experian Marketing Services Sarah Ilie, Strategic Partner Manager, Experian Marketing Services

We’re excited to introduce our new Q&A series, Ask the Expert! Ask the Expert will feature a series of conversations with product experts. We’ll spotlight and dive into the areas you care most about: identity resolution, targeting, attribution, and more. Our first segment features a conversation on Hashed Email. Jeff Tognetti, the Product Development Team Lead at DealerX joins us to chat with Experian’s Chief Revenue Officer, Chris Feo. Chris and Jeff review how to future-proof your identity strategy by exploring Hashed Email use cases, technical details, and offer an expert point of view on the cookieless future. Let’s review a few highlights from their conversation. DealerX’s use case When DealerX first started working with us, we focused on digital identity. DealerX wanted to understand the browsing habits of their first-party shoppers that relate to their clients: What they’re doing How they’re interacting with client sites and products Apply those learnings to target them across the web Eliminate ad fraud and targeting waste Our partnership gave DealerX the ability to take an anonymous consumer from anywhere across their portfolio of customers and understand who they are, while in an anonymous state. Then, they could activate on any channel where that consumer may be in the market for a product. This allowed DealerX to resolve who these people are as they browse the web, leading to reduced ad spend and targeting waste. This was the original and primary use case for DealerX when partnering with us. So, when did Hashed Email come into the mix for DealerX? Before we dive into the specifics, let’s take a step back and understand Hashed Email. What is Hashed Email? Hashed Email is a privacy-safe identifier that can further enrich the connection between the online (digital) and offline (real world) ecosystems. When paired with the Tapad Graph with access to Tapad’s universe of email data, it can provide maximum coverage for targeting and measurement when combined with IDs such as cookies, mobile ad IDs (MAIDs), connected TV (CTV) IDs, and IP addresses. Email hashing uses a method of coding to transform an email address into a jumble of numbers and letters so that it’s fully pseudonymized and privacy safe. Hashed emails can then be used as a digital identifier when a user is logged in to that email and trace their activity – without linking back to the user’s real email address. This allows marketers to collect data on their users and understand their behavior without knowing their email address – a win for both consumer privacy and marketer insight. DealerX & Hashed Email DealerX was one of our first customers to onboard Hashed Email to the Tapad Graph. Adding Hashed Email gave them a privacy-compliant way to work with identity and resolve what a user did on their site. This allowed them to gain insight into where an ad and impression was served; even the day and time these actions occurred. Now, we’re not the only data partner that DealerX works with. Many companies offer the notion of converting email to a digital ID in a privacy-safe way. How does DealerX evaluate the right data partner? Evaluating the right data partner When we say, ‘data partner,’ we’re referring to the data, the service, and the support. The most important characteristics to consider when choosing a data partner, according to DealerX, include: Technical prowess Efficiency Agility Scalability Why did DealerX choose to partner with us? Our services met the characteristics they were looking for in a data partner. We grew the product by iterating on features that worked best for Jeff and his team. The rollout was organized, efficient, and lacked bureaucracy, which can slow down an implementation timeline. While we started our relationship with DealerX as a vendor, now we're partners. How did we transition from vendor to partner? Transitioning from vendor to partner The key to a great partnership is trust. It’s tough to navigate an ecosystem with numerous companies that claim to have the same products and services. The relationship will start off as vendor-client, and both teams will get to know each other’s strengths and weaknesses. As the vendor makes your work seamless and offers an efficient implementation process, the relationship turns into a partnership. There’s more! This is just a taste of Chris and Jeff’s conversation. Visit the Ask the Expert content hub to watch a recording of the conversation. Stay tuned for future segments in our Ask the Expert series. We’re just getting started! About DealerX In just a few short years, DealerX has grown to serve 1,000’s of Tier 3 dealerships across all brands, enterprise partners and OEMs. Their keen approach to data, analytics, machine learning and programmatic initiatives have led DealerX to quickly become the most savvy player in the automotive space. DealerX has helped automotive retailers save 10’s of millions of dollars by avoiding fraud and eliminating wasteful ads pends, while dramatically reducing “cost per sale." In doing so, their partners significantly outperform those leveraging generic “one size fits all” competitive offerings. To learn more, visit their website at Dealerx.com.