Google launched the first fledgling clean room back in 2017. Ever since, they’ve often been touted as a solution to cookie deprecation. While clean rooms are still an emerging technology one thing is clear: clean rooms are critical to the future of data collaboration. But clean rooms as they are today will go through revolutionary changes before they’ll be used to effectively power the advanced marketing use cases we need from them.

Partnership is the Way to Build Clean Room Technology in These Early Days

Clean rooms are an emerging market. We haven’t yet identified the full set of capabilities and use cases they’ll power. But there are a few vendors pioneering the data collaboration category, including Snowflake, LiveRamp, Habu and InfoSum. They offer technology solutions built to take data from point A and send it to point B and vice versa. It’s important to note that there is fierce competition amongst these providers. While brands might be partnering with multiple of these companies to power data collaboration, that doesn’t mean these providers will play well with each other. 

The challenge becomes sharing data not just between A-B, but also between C,D,E,F. When developing data clean rooms, it’s important to build technology that’s truly flexible enough to collaborate between all data sources seamlessly, current and future – this is true interoperability. 

Future-ready data clean rooms aren’t just interoperable, they’re also flexible and ready to evolve with the market. That’s why a DIY approach just won’t cut it. Companies whose focus is decidedly not data technology likely won’t have the bandwidth and expertise required to continue to maintain and evolve the clean rooms they’ve built in house. 

Partnership with a company that can build and maintain a clean room together with a brand’s team is the best way to handle this emerging, yet incredibly important technology. This partner should be an expert in data architecture, offering a white labeled solution that’s fully owned and operated by the brand’s team – but built and maintained by theirs.  Let’s look at an example of a company who’s built a future-ready clean room, ready to evolve with the market.

Inside a Future-Ready Data Clean Room: Clear Channel Outdoor

Clear Channel Outdoor (CCO) is a leading out of home (OOH) media company revolutionizing the category with digital-first best practices. For many consumers and marketers alike, OOH isn’t necessarily viewed as a cutting-edge, techy medium. CCO has disproved that reputation time and time again.

They recently announced the launch of their data clean room. There’s a key difference between their clean room and companies like Paramount  who’ve built clean rooms in house.  While, similar to Paramount, CCO also integrates with data collaboration partners like LiveRamp and InfoSum, CCO  selected a partner to help them build the underlying infrastructure that these partners integrate into. You guessed it – that partner is Aqfer.  

There are multiple benefits of building with a company like Aqfer. For starters, we’re experts in data infrastructure – while CCO is laser-focused on delivering more/better value in OOH, we’re laser-focused on delivering more/better value in clean room technology. While Aqfer and CCO engineers collaborated to purpose-build the right clean room for CCO customers today, they can rest easy knowing our data infrastructure experts are on top of maintenance and evolving trends in the space. This ensures CCO will always have cutting edge clean room technology, no matter market trends and changes. 

Another benefit of building clean room technology with Aqfer is true interoperability. We don’t compete with the Snowflakes of the world – so we truly play well with others. CCO’s clean room stack also includes data collaboration from LiveRamp and InfoSum – two staunch competitors. While these vendors don’t interact directly, Aqfer is a neutral third party for ingesting and integrating data supplied by both partners. 

Aqfer clean rooms are fully white labeled. CCO doesn’t run an Aqfer clean room – they run a CCO owned and managed clean room, powered by Aqfer. You won’t see much of us in the tech newswires. And that’s how we like it. We’d rather amplify stories of Aqfer clients whose industry-disrupting solutions we help power. 

If you’re interested in learning more about deploying a data clean room powered by Aqfer, click here to explore our secure data collaboration solution.