SAN JUAN, PR — They are billed as a software tool for bringing data back together after the demise of identifiers.

But could “data clean rooms” actually end up making marketers’ lives even more difficult?

In this interview with Beet.TV Events editorial director Jon Watts at Beet Retreat, Mike Bregman, Chief Data Officer, Havas Media Group, says he fears the rise of clean rooms could lead to a proliferation in the ad-tech stack.

Clean room benefits

Clean rooms allow companies to use and share data in a controlled and secure environment, ensuring that sensitive information is protected and that the privacy of consumers is not violated.

They are used for tasks such as audience insights, audience segmentation and activation, and measurement and attribution.

Bregman says people are adopting the tool because traditional identifiers like cookies, IDs and IP addresses are declining in usefulness, thanks to tech vendors’ changes stimulated by legislation.

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Forward and back

But he says the rise of a diverse clean room offering could be a problem.

“There’s almost a confusing amount of technology that’s in the way of consolidating that,” he says.

“The challenge is that each of the publishers, media companies, are doing it individually.

“You have a thousand different clean room technologies that are all independent and somewhat fragmented, which takes us forward in terms of privacy and security and what the audiences consumers are looking for – but a step back in terms of the usefulness”.

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No garden in the room

Bregman says clean rooms should not be a “dead end” and should not have a “brick wall”, meaning they need to offer interoperability – lest clean rooms look like just another “walled garden” platform.

“You need a way to push (data) back and, in a great world, sync it with other data sets when it’s coming out,” Bregman says.

If there’s individual experiments that are run in all of these different walled gardens or clean room tech, you want to be able to bring it together and be able to tell an advertiser, ‘Here’s how everything is working, how all your dollars are working together’.”

Converging clean

Bregman’s Havas Media Group has its own ad planning and buying platform, Converged.

It partnered with LiveRamp to enable a data collaboration service within Converged.

“We’ve spent the last couple years, invested quite a few millions of dollars into it,” Bregman says, adding he will continue to partner for the platform.

“What we’re trying to do is to start off with a partner-and-build mentality. Instead of making a $1 billion-plus acquisition and buying some old technology, we’re going to build it from scratch.

“We’re going to assemble our Avengers superheroes. We’re going to create something that’s going stand us of time.”

You’re watching coverage of Beet Retreat San Juan 2023, presented by LiveRamp, Madhive, Magnite, Paramount, T-Mobile Advertising Solutions and VideoAmp. For more videos from the Beet Retreat, please visit this page.