Data clean rooms are hot with advertisers, and ahead of upfronts season, Warner Bros. Discovery is leaning in.
This year, the company is onboarding several major agency holding companies into its clean room, which is supported through partnerships with the ad-tech company Snowflake and the media measurement provider VideoAmp. Using its ad-tech platform Olli, WBD inputs advertiser data through its clean room and leverages the first-party data in its Audience Graph to serve targeted ads across its inventory through its StreamX platform.
WBD’s clean room securely processes data transfers and aims to more precisely serve campaigns, David Porter, ad sales research, data, and insights head at WBD, said, which the company outlined in a proof-of-concept study detailed in a whitepaper published in January.
“Data clean rooms are a buzzword these days, and we’re hearing a lot about them,” he told Marketing Brew. “It really is an all-purpose utility application.”
Clean up the mess: Onboarding data through more traditional third-party technology instead of clean rooms can be problematic for both WBD and its advertisers, Porter said. Using a third-party platform can require re-sending data on a daily basis, which can be not only cumbersome, but also costly, Porter said. The transfer of data through a third party can also potentially cause the loss of certain household data, he added: “If somebody’s addresses didn’t match up correctly, then that household basically fell on [the] cutting-room floor.”
Through the use of its clean room, Porter said WBD can ideally alleviate privacy concerns by eliminating third parties in the data transfer process while also increasing the available data. According to the whitepaper, onboarding audiences through clean rooms produced 3.2x more targetable IDs compared to “traditional third party methods.
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Porter said that running its own clean room also helps WBD get a better sense of advertiser campaign performance. Prior to its clean-room integration, WBD relied on measurement partners that used pixels and cookies. Now it partners with measurement and attribution providers like VideoAmp within its clean room to analyze information about households that were exposed to campaigns “in a very privacy-compliant manner,” he said.
Advertisers who ran campaigns on WBD’s StreamX platform yielded 5x more visitors to their websites and 7x higher sales penetration than industry norms, according to the whitepaper. In a test of 25 campaigns, WBD also measured 67% more on-target impressions.
Get in line: Other streamers are investing in clean rooms and other ad tech to increase interoperability. Disney expanded its clean room offering in January 2024, inking partnerships with AWSs and Google Cloud, and ahead of its annual Global Tech & Data Showcase at CES last month, where it debuted Disney Compass, a data platform supported by companies including VideoAmp and Snowflake.
Disney and Roku have both partnered with The Trade Desk in the last year with an eye toward interoperability, and both work with Google’s DV360. In August, Netflix partnered with Snowflake and other ad-tech shops to support advertiser access to clean rooms.