Amazon Announces AWS Clean Rooms To Boost Adtech Growth

AWS launched a new service that will help customers and their partners inside an advertising or marketing organization share, analyze and collaborate on combined datasets without running the risk of revealing personal data. With AWS Clean Rooms, customers can create a secure data clean room in minutes and collaborate with any other company in the AWS Cloud to generate unique insights about advertising campaigns, investment decisions, clinical research, and more.

Amazon intends to capitalize on its success as a digital advertising platform as it foresees a void in data capabilities for advertisers when Google deprecates third-party cookies later next year. During the Amazon Ads Unboxed conference, Amazon highlighted the product as a homegrown data clean room. AWS clean rooms and planned identity resolution tools target brand marketers, agencies, publishers, and martech companies to provide purpose-built services.AWS Clean Rooms also includes advanced cryptographic computing tools that keep data encrypted, even as queries are processed, to comply with stringent data handling policies.

How does it work?

AWS data clean rooms explained

Data clean rooms are protected environments where multiple parties can collaborate and analyze data without revealing raw data. Amazon is also enabling customers to leverage clean rooms by addressing the old-school way of data sharing.- one company often has to provide a copy of their user-level data to their partners and rely on contractual agreements to prevent misuse.

They are hard and expensive to build, require complex privacy controls, and specialized tools to protect each participant’s data, and are time-consuming in customizing analytics tools. After building up a data clean room, it needs constant data updates for new collaborators and data types. Amazon is addressing these challenges with AWS data clean room. AWS allows 5 parties to collaborate in one collaboration. 

For instance, an automotive brand with customer loyalty data can collaborate with another brand that has data on a user’s ad-clicking behavior for better insight and user experience. The idea is for brands and media publishers to set up a clean room and collaborate over data in a few clicks than spending time to build it. Companies collaborate, and contribute their data in any type while protecting the underlying data using configurable controls.

The company emphasizes the importance of sharing data for improving the effectiveness of advertising campaigns. In the future, third-party cookies will disappear, whereas tech giants like Apple will give consumers more control over their data privacy giving them more knowledge about how their data is being used.

Identity Resolution

In the coming months, AWS will also introduce new identity resolution capabilities to help businesses match and link customer records stored across disparate channels without the need to build and maintain complex workflows. The press release stated that with identity resolution capabilities, customers can create a unified view of their interactions with consumers. Companies who want to collaborate with other partners in a clean room can use automated identity resolution workflows that identify common user IDs across datasets and help them more easily join data together.

AWS Clean Rooms is available as a standalone offering and as part of AWS for Advertising and Marketing. It will be available in early 2023 on the U.S. East and West coasts as well as parts of  Asia Pacific and Europe.

The Amazon Marketing Cloud

Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) is a secure, privacy-safe clean room application from Amazon Ads on Amazon Web series infrastructure. Marketers can use it for custom analytics and cross-channel analysis. Builders can utilize AMC APIs to create their own offerings, while analysts can interact with a user interface available through the Amazon Ad Console.

AMC’s core value proposition is its ability to ingest both in-store and direct-to-consumer sales. In Amazon’s clean room, this data can be integrated into analytics reports for advertisers to understand total sales and which channels are generating incremental sales. Paula Despins, vice president of Ads Measurement at Amazon Ads said, 

“Providing marketers with greater control over their own signals, while being able to analyze them in conjunction with signals from Amazon Ads, is crucial in today’s marketing landscape.”

“By migrating AMC’s compute infrastructure to AWS Clean Rooms under the hood, marketers can use their own signals in AMC without moving data out of their AWS environment. This simplifies how marketers can manage their signals and enables AMC teams to focus on building new capabilities for brands.”

How clean are clean rooms?

There is a lot of debate around data clean rooms safety and security and remains an open question. Programmatic landscapes are evolving, and clean rooms are just one part of them. Insider Intelligence shows that 37% of media owners and agencies respectively are increasing their investment in clean rooms. Earlier this year, Omnicom, Roku, and Disney launched clean rooms.

Security concerns arise despite the fact that they do not reveal private customer information. Thus, businesses must ensure that they adhere to consistent security and privacy rules or risk consumers calling them out. Thus, businesses must ensure that they adhere to consistent security and privacy rules or risk consumers calling them out.

More to Read: Clean Rooms Explained: How Marketers Can Prepare For Cookieless World