LAS VEGAS — General Motors wants to respect its audiences’ privacy – and it is testing-out new tech to do it.
“Clean rooms are, from my perspective, the future,” says Ajay Kapoor, Global Director, Performance-Driven Marketing, GM, In this video interview with Beet.TV.
Kapoor says marketers like him are trying out the emerging software category.
‘Next big challenge’
Clean room technology allows media buyers and sellers to match their consumer data without directly sharing it with each other – something which could breach the growing number of privacy laws.
Kapoor is already supportive. He says: “The question comes down to, ‘How do you orchestrate the clean rooms across the overall activation space and then get measurement to tie back to understand, ‘Did that impact, did that not for me?”
“This is the next foray, the next big challenge for all of the modern marketers out there.”
Testing the market
Clean room tech has been around for a couple of years, but has gained particular attention in 2022 and 2023, with a number of vendors emerging.
“We’re talking to all of them,” Kapoor says, “looking at everyone that’s driving a progressive clean room, safety-first, trust-verified ecosystem, and really looking at what cookie deprecation and the future of a cookieless world looks like.”
For him, such partnerships are crucial.
“We need to drive activation at scale – we need to hit all of America,” he says. “We have to talk to all the publishers. We have to talk to all the platforms and really understand what’s their strategy, where are they going? And then put our lens against that.
“We’re being very thoughtful around where and how do we leverage clean rooms with partners, ensuring that first-party data stays trusted and protected wherever it goes.”
Early questions
Executives interviewed by Beet.TV at CES 2023 all reported growing maturity and sophistication in a clean room environment that remains somewhat nascent.
“We’re early in these conversations and I think a few different players are leading the pack on that,” GM’s Kapoor adds.
“Everyone’s grappling with the question, ‘Where do I stand up my own clean room? Do I use a third party or do I do everything on the edge?’ And I think that’s a complicated question that we have yet to solve.”
You’re watching ‘Clean Rooms: Collaboration Goes Mainstream,’ a Beet.TV Leadership Series produced at CES 2023, presented by Habu. For more videos from this series, please visit this page. For all of our coverage from CES 2023, please click here.
