To use a data clean room, do brands need a lot of data?
Many brands assume that employing a clean room requires a lot of existing first-party data. If they don’t have it, they may not consider data clean rooms as a viable solution to reach in-market customers. The truth is brands could have little to no first-party data and use martech tools like clean rooms to make a huge impact on their marketing success.
To have the best marketing performance, brands need to identify and leverage their first-party data even if they need to supplement it. Some clean room solutions act as empty containers and can only work with a brand’s limited first-party data. The best solutions help brands grow, enrich and maximize the data they have even if it’s a small amount.
How? By linking and aggregating different pseudonymized data sources in privacy-safe spaces where brands can access partner and third-party data for exploration and media activation.
Defeating data deficits
Not all brands have a lot of data at their disposal. Let’s look at a real-world example using a CPG brands.
- Most consumer goods products are sold through a retailer, like supermarkets or pharmacies. This severely decreases the first-party data they can collect, even on their most loyal customers.
- These brands need help, often in the form of second-party data gathered by the retailers where the CPG products are purchased.
- A clean room facilitates those partner-collected insights, such as retailer transaction data, to create actionable profiles while allowing the partner to maintain a high standard of data privacy and security.
How does this work in action?
A leading pet food company wanted to message specific in-market customers for a niche set of products but were relying on category purchasers and current customers. When they used Epsilon’s clean room, they used purchase behavior data as well as custom data from Circana—a consumer brand and retail market research and data provider—to find competitive conquests.
Understanding purchase behavior helped the brand identify the best people to conquest. Campaigns to these new shoppers drove high return on advertising spend—more than 8x their benchmark—and these shoppers became the brand’s second-best performing group of shoppers overall, including their existing clientele.
Stronger solutions supported by identity
Many clean rooms can enable some level of data enrichment, but the strongest solutions go a step further. Using a clean room with persistent identity resolution allows brands to go beyond basic audience capabilities and create one-to-one connections with in-market and prospective customers.
Epsilon's clean room is supported by CORE ID, which matches against 250 million+ unique IDs and continuously updates based on signals from more than 14,000 partner publishers. Epsilon's unique identity layer connects online and offline identities, including thousands of demographic and lifestyle data points such as U.S. Census data, and isn't prone to duplications and inaccuracies found in other solutions built on email addresses or third-party cookies.
Better insights drive better media activation
Having person-based, persistent identity puts more granular insights at a brand's fingertips. This means brands who typically relied on vague segmentation and audiences can now deliver relevant messages to individual people who are ready to buy.
With Epsilon's clean room, brands can expect:
- A 360-degree view of customers and prospects that includes demographic, lifestyle and transaction data.
- Current, detailed insights that identify and cultivate new, high-growth customers with predictive modeling based on a brand's best customers. This also increases the understanding of current customers, driving better retention strategies.
- More efficient campaign performance executed through direct-media activation partners, including Epsilon Digital, with higher data fidelity.
- Accurate and persistent cross-channel measurement, on both owned and paid channels, that measures effectiveness of media spend (reducing ad waste).
- Micro-segmentation capabilities that identify niche audiences ready for activation and measurement.
Brands that once were forced to rely on weak identifiers to activate campaigns to vague audiences can now speak directly to real customers with real wallets who are ready to buy.
Activating these campaigns through Epsilon Digital connects brands with two to three times more of their in-market customers on the open web compared to other media activation partners. And because media can be activated directly from Epsilon's clean room solution, brands can feel confident they won't experience any data loss.
A strong clean room solution should give marketers expanded access to data and data science so they can react faster, localize to their markets, and execute cross-channel campaigns without sacrificing data security.
No matter how much or little data a brand has, Epsilon's clean room solutions find and connect them with the best unique in-market prospects through use of top-notch, privacy-protected consumer data.
