{"id":22681,"date":"2022-12-12T10:41:43","date_gmt":"2022-12-12T10:41:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mailinvest.blog\/index.php\/2022\/12\/12\/amazon-is-taking-on-data-clean-rooms\/"},"modified":"2022-12-12T10:41:43","modified_gmt":"2022-12-12T10:41:43","slug":"amazon-is-taking-on-data-clean-rooms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mailinvest.blog\/index.php\/2022\/12\/12\/amazon-is-taking-on-data-clean-rooms\/","title":{"rendered":"Amazon Is Taking on Data Clean Rooms"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Amazon Web Services,<\/a> the tech giant\u2019s cloud storage unit, is launching its own clean room technology<\/a> next year, the company recently announced. <\/p>\n

In doing so, Amazon, which already runs a huge retail media business, demand-side platform and streaming services, is expanding its footprint into another part of the advertising industry, and one that is still fairly nascent: privacy-safe ad tech. <\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

Data clean rooms let advertisers and publishers join their data and find overlap without leakage. They have become a buzzword in advertising as the industry braces itself for a future without third-party cookies and more privacy regulations. Amazon is poised to be one of the most competitive solutions on the market, three sources told Adweek. <\/p>\n

Amazon\u2019s growing tech footprint helps it compare favorably to other clean room providers, but its size is also a liability, as many of its potential customers also compete with Amazon on one line of business or the other, and may be wary of trusting the giant with even more of their business.<\/p>\n

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\u201cIs it wise to consolidate on a single stack?\u201d said Ana Milicevic, co-founder of ad-tech consultancy Sparrow Advisors on how the marketing and media industry should evaluate investing further in Amazon. \u201cDepending on who you are, that answer may change.\u201d<\/p>\n

Clean rooms are just one of a litany of identity solutions advertisers<\/a> can turn to when third-party cookies become obsolete. They\u2019re generally more accessible to the larger advertisers and publishers who have enough first-party data that sharing it is useful, Milicevic said. A survey of 266 marketing professionals by data clean room firm Habu found that 53% had never used one, according to an August report<\/a> in Digiday. <\/p>\n

Connecting the thousands of data lakes<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Still, clean rooms promise data security, and Amazon is leaning into the space. Amazon Ads, a separate business within the tech giant, offers a clean room<\/a> solution called Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC), but its use case is confined to advertisers linking their data with signals from Amazon media properties, such as their websites and streaming services. AWS clean rooms can be used to link data from any two companies, including other publishers or companies not even in the advertising industry.<\/p>\n

The new AWS offering will still strengthen AMC; AWS clean room infrastructure will eventually be baked into AMC, allowing marketers to minimize data transfers. Without AWS clean rooms, marketers using AWS had to migrate all their data when they wanted to use AMC and now all operations can happen in one place, minimizing data leakage.<\/p>\n

AWS\u2019s global head of data collaboration and interoperability solutions for advertising and marketing Adam Solomon told Adweek that the data clean room solution was designed to meet customer demands.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat we heard from customers is there are hundreds of thousands of data lakes already on AWS,\u201d he said, referring to repositories of data. \u201cIf \u2026 I want to collaborate and we\u2019re both on AWS \u2026 is there any way that we can do this without moving our data elsewhere?\u201d<\/p>\n

With its entrance into clean rooms, Amazon is becoming a player in another corner of advertising, an industry it\u2019s already starting to dominate (the company was one of the few tech giants<\/a> to report a strong third quarter for its advertising business). <\/p>\n

Protecting against potential data leakage<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Google is Amazon\u2019s most direct competitor, with both a cloud business and an ads business, but Amazon\u2019s new offering is pretty differentiated, sources said. <\/p>\n

Google offers clean room solution Ads Data hub, but it only works against Google properties, not the entire internet, making it more akin to Amazon Marketing Cloud. Google Cloud does not offer its own clean room tech, meaning Google Cloud customers would have to use a third party to match their data with non-Google sources.<\/p>\n

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We treat Amazon Ads like any other customer of AWS.<\/p>\n

\u2014Adam Solomon<\/em>, global head of data collaboration and interoperability solutions for advertising and marketing, AWS <\/cite><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Google did introduce<\/a> Publisher Advertiser Identity Reconciliation, or PAIR, in October to connect publisher and advertiser data, but via its ad-tech platform DV360, and not at the infrastructure layer of cloud data storage.<\/p>\n

\u201cGoogle doesn\u2019t have an equivalent to AWS clean rooms,\u201d said Alex Cone, co-founder of Coir, an ads privacy learning platform.<\/p>\n

Tech vendors that solely provide clean room technology may also note Amazon\u2019s entry into the market with unease. Most of these vendors don\u2019t have the ability to store data, meaning that a marketer would have to move their data from a place like AWS or Google Cloud to the vendor\u2019s software, which opens the potential for leakage, said Nancy Marzouk, CEO or identity-focused ad-tech firm MediaWallah.<\/p>\n

Reflecting the potential threat of Amazon, clean room tech firm InfoSum published<\/a> a blog post highlighting what differentiates its product, while also emphasizing InfoSum\u2019s capability to collaborate with AWS.<\/p>\n

\u201cFrom InfoSum\u2019s perspective, the AWS Clean Rooms is a welcome addition; it has done little for the other vendors to bring them closer to InfoSum\u2019s key strengths,\u201d the blog post read.<\/p>\n

But businesses such as retailers might be wary of sharing data with AWS since they may compete with Amazon\u2019s retail and media businesses, Cone said. <\/p>\n

However, Solomon stressed customer data is not shared from AWS to Amazon Ads. \u201cAWS takes the security of our customer data very seriously,\u201d he said. \u201cWe treat Amazon Ads like any other customer of AWS.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n