Data clean rooms may be the key to unlocking retail media standardization and seamless data collaboration for retailers and advertisers alike, experts said during a Wednesday roundtable on retail media hosted by the Interactive Advertising Bureau.
Establishing consistent measurement metrics for ad campaigns continues to be a hurdle for the industry as retail media capabilities advance rapidly. And while not a new practice, leaning into the use of clean rooms will help bolster data collaboration across the industry as well as facilitate consistent measurement, providing a more comprehensive view of ad campaign performance, panelists said.
Data clean rooms are secure and controlled spaces where multiple companies can compile data for joint analysis. Advertisers are then able to compare these data sets to determine whether they’re hitting the correct audience with ads.
Many retailers, including grocers, have already put clean rooms to work. Evan Hovorka, Albertsons Media Collective’s vice president of product innovation, said the grocer is primarily using clean rooms to see how they can take different retail media initiatives further and implement strategies across its numerous banners.
“If we’re going to work with an agency or a brand directly who wants to promote shoppable ad units [for example], we better figure out a way to support all those unique banners and in-stocks and items at a price in a seamless manner — clean rooms can unlock that,” he said.
Kavita Cariapa, senior vice president and head of commerce for activation at Dentsu, noted that clean rooms allow for collaboration on measurement methodology and the opportunity for retailers to explain to CPG partners how a campaign performed at scale.
However, the collaboration can expand beyond one retailer and advertiser.
If all retailers could adopt a standardization framework for each major topic within retail media — something agencies have already done — CPGs who sell at dozens of different retailers won’t have to navigate different methodologies and structures to determine the success of their ad campaigns, Hovorka said.
Once a clean room standardization method is adopted, retailers will only need to discuss use cases for ad campaign launches that best fit a CPG partner’s needs, he added.
While individual retailers are advancing closed-loop measurement capabilities within their networks, the missing piece is consistency, making partnerships with numerous retailers a headache for brand partners, according to Hovorka. And it doesn’t matter if one retailer’s methodology is better than the other if all the metrics are different, he noted.
“[Clean rooms] might remove a little bit of capability and flexibility, but it’ll make scale and consistency and our clients’ sanity much easier to achieve,” Hovorka said. “So I’m excited for the adoption layer now that we need to kick into gear for cleanroom standardization.”
