Roku Is The New Player: A Look At Its Data Clean Room Strategy

Not to be left out, Roku this week dove into the data clean room. It will offer brands and agencies a way to collaborate with them using encrypted first-party data. The concept — built for streaming television — is intended to make planning and measuring campaigns easier without the use of cookies. With agency partners, Omnicom Media Group, Horizon Media, and Dentsu, the streaming TV platform announced the launch of its proprietary clean room offering. The product is based on Snowflake’s media and ad tech cloud data infrastructure.

A clean room is a place where publishers, platforms, and brands can safely and securely share first-party data in a way that can improve advertising effectiveness while still exerting strict controls over user privacy.

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Purpose-built for TV streaming

Roku’s clean room is purpose-built for TV streaming. The planning and measurement capabilities make it the only clean room to use audience data and linear TV data from direct consumer relationships on Roku, America’s No. 1 TV streaming platform.

The company explained in the press release to start with, an advertiser loads their data into a secure environment. Roku’s data clean room creates a secure connection between Roku data and the advertiser’s data. This enables brands to match their own data to Roku’s without sharing or exposing any personally identifiable information, all while protecting Roku users from direct identification. Advertisers can then query matched data and run their analysis within Roku’s clean room to understand potential campaign reach, current audience delivery, and advertising impact on product sales and sign-ups. OneView is also directly integrated with Roku’s clean room. Roku’s omnichannel demand-side platform (DSP) allows them to reach their audience across CTV, display, and mobile.

A look into Roku’s clean room

For instance, Foursquare, a leading location technology platform is a measurement and data partner for Roku’s clean room. The brands can better personalize and attribute their ad campaigns in OneView across devices and platforms.

The company’s first-party location data could be combined with Roku’s to target households in a certain area watching lifestyle and food programs or have people between the ages of 20 and 40 living there. Foursquare will provide the mobile location, but Roku can give behavioral and basic demographic information.

With a clean room, it is possible to match Roku-to-Foursquare audiences, but complex tracking can be layered into the campaign as well. Advertisers can use Roku data and Foursquare data to hone in on an anonymized audience segment in an area that meets their target requirements, then target that segment on Roku.

However, that is a one-time action item. If the advertiser wants to repeat the same activity a year after then it will have to resync the data as well as create a new list for a similar but distinct segment. On the contrary, in a clean room environment, the same type of audiences can be tracked over the years to understand sales and conversions.  They can also determine what kind of streaming content causes transactions. This is advantageous for advertisers because a typical Roku ad purchase cannot be segmented based on the content viewed.

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Roku jumping on the bandwagon

The timing is not by chance. During the TV upfronts next month, Roku plans to test out several new services, including its clean room, with major advertisers. In a soon-to-be cookie-less world, data clean rooms are crucial to measuring advertising effectively.  Louqman Parampath, VP of Product Management, Roku which has 60 million active accounts said,

 The future of TV advertising won’t rely on fragile cookies or consortiums, but on direct connection with actual consumers. We are thrilled to help marketers accelerate their shift to TV streaming by putting privacy and transparency first.

He also added that cleanrooms are in the early stages, but are actively running campaigns.

We believe over time this will be the way first-party data will be used for connected TV.

Although the clean room isn’t a Nielsen alternative – advertisers and broadcasters are experimenting with alternate currencies and methods for measuring TV campaigns. It is perfectly positioned to fit into the trend of new TV attribution models.

Interesting Read: Disney Launches Clean Room For Marketers’ First-Party Data Needs