As brands seek to develop more meaningful ways to communicate and interact with customers, collecting and activating first-party data has never been more important. First-party data is customer information collected and owned by brands. Behavior across websites, purchase history, and interactions with marketing channels like email open and read rates are all examples of first-party data. 

Though brands are growing their in-house first-party data capabilities, they still need to collaborate with partners to ensure excellent marketing experiences. Brands partnering with marketing service providers, advertisers and data companies need secure methods for sharing customer data. Brands will be looking to their partners for offering guidance and secure solutions for sharing and managing their customer data.

Data clean rooms are the most secure way for brands to share valuable customer data with their marketing partners.

The Importance of Secure Data Collaboration

To help brands develop better marketing experiences, MSPs and advertisers rely on data to connect the right consumers with the right messages. Using brand-supplied first-party data to inform advertising experiences offers unique opportunities for targeted interaction and multi-channel planning. But it also creates the need for a secure, compliant environment for aggregating and sharing that data. Data clean rooms give advertising and marketing service providers access to brand data, allowing them to improve their predictive models and provide more valuable services.

While brands are responsible for their customers’ data, MSPs and advertisers are often juggling customer data for a number of brands simultaneously. To safely handle large volumes of data, they can’t rely on external solutions.

It’s important for MSPs to develop secure, compliant data sharing environments that are owned and managed in-house. These data sharing, or clean room environments ensure Personal Identifiable Information (PII) is encrypted and transformed in privacy-compliant ways, so that it’s only accessible by the brand. 

What Brands Want in a Data Clean Room

Brand demand for secure data collaboration and data clean room technology is still rather nascent. Brands are still growing their first-party data strategies and capabilities. And they’re only just beginning to learn about data security requirements and use cases for clean rooms. 

Looking ahead to the inevitable end of the third-party cookie, the question isn’t if brands will want their MSPs to offer clean room environments…. But when. When evaluating clean rooms, here are some of the things brands should be looking for:

Stringent Data Privacy: Brands will want to rest assured knowing only their internal team members will have access to view critical data like PPI.

Frictionless Data Matching: When brands share data, they’ll want to know it will be accurately processed and tagged to ensure accurate data matching and friction-free data sets.

Accurate Attribution Reporting: When brands grant MSPs access to more/better data, they’ll expect more/better reporting on campaign performance. It’s important for MSPs to have the confidence in their systems to allow them to confidently and accurately report on marketing and advertising performance.

How MSPs are Building Data Clean Room Technology

Data clean rooms will be a fundamental piece of data architecture for marketing service providers in the coming years. The problem is, building robust technology to ingest, anonymize and activate brand data is no small task. It’s incredibly important for MSPs to own this technology in house, but that doesn’t mean they have to build it themselves, sacrificing precious engineering capacity and multiple years of work, not to mention ongoing maintenance. 

Develop a secure data collaboration environment faster, with a build-it-together approach. Aqfer is the only marketing data as a service platform that helps MSPs go to market faster with foundational data infrastructure like data clean rooms. Aqfer’s data clean room solution offers fully white labled technology owned and operated by your business, co-built and vetted by the best clean room developers in the game. 

Click here to learn more about the Aqfer approach to data clean rooms.