As the digital advertising industry enters into a privacy-first era, it remains in pursuit of data-driven innovations to navigate the shift. Data clean rooms initially emerged as the go-to answer for data-driven marketing. However, many adopters are finding it difficult to enrich their data and extract actionable insights to drive ROI. This post explores how decision intelligence enhances data clean rooms, offering the industry what it ultimately needs—effortless, timely insights to drive business decisions.
The Promise and Shortfall of Data Clean Rooms
The IAB’s 2023 State of Data report highlights that while DCR adoption is growing, the industry is struggling to unlock its full potential and achieve meaningful ROI.
Challenges with the Clean Room that Deplete its ROI
- 1. Lack of Time-Series Data Support:
- Real-time vs. batch impacts data driven value. Programmatic advertising targets a response time of less than 200 ms. In the pursuit of privacy, marketers have accepted technical processes that slow the speed of collaboration and are unable to leverage insights in real-time.
- 2. Hidden Costs of Privacy Infrastructure: Deloitte estimated that, in 2022, the average cost of clean room technology will be $879K, yet only one-third of clean rooms are used extensively.
- 3. Escalating Labor Costs: DCRs require costly and specialized labor to deploy, maintain, and operate. The ongoing cost of human capital creates unexpected challenges, as such skilled labor is often difficult to recruit and retain.
4. Scalability Challenges: By design, each campaign requires its own data clean room. Each clean room usually works like its own private 'island,' with its own rules, access controls, and data management. As companies try to scale their use of clean rooms, they end up juggling more and more isolated setups, increasing the complexity and overhead of the investment. - 5. Interoperability and Performance Limitations: A lack of standardization between clean room implementations begets more challenges and complexities. Additionally, DCRs require adoptees to trade-off between the advanced processing for privacy, and time-to-insights. This significantly hinders performance.
Decision Intelligence: Bridging the Gap Between Data and Decisions
At its core, the data clean room (DCR) is just the starting point within the Madtech ecosystem. While DCRs sanitize first-party data, their value often stops there. The real power lies in connecting data across multiple sources in real-time, bridging critical gaps between the DCR and ROI. The future lies in secure, real-time data enrichment and collaboration, driven by decision intelligence and designed for the modern Madtech landscape.
Decision Intelligence (DI) empowers the media industry to make real-time, data-driven decisions by leveraging advanced analytics, AI, and machine learning to extract value from data. But DI goes beyond offering more data or better analytics—it's about delivering a comprehensive solution that enables users to make informed decisions quickly and efficiently.
The Future of Madtech: Recapturing Value with SCUBA Analytics
SCUBA is leading the charge in accelerating the time from data to insights, and ultimately, business decisions. Unlike traditional DCRs that require moving data to a controlled environment, SCUBA empowers businesses to take back full control over their data while still enjoying the benefits of real-time collaboration decision intelligence. SCUBA’s embedded privacy-enhancing technology enables the industry to analyze data where it lives, without moving a byte. This achieves the ultimate goal: scalability, security, and most importantly, fast, accurate, and democratized insights.
SCUBA’s collaborative decision intelligence platform unlocks:
- Simplicity and Immediate, Actionable Insights
- Secure Collaboration Across Ecosystems
- Enhanced ID Graphic Methodology Support
- Flexible and Secure Data Integration
How Leading Publishers Leverage SCUBA to Drive Revenue
A leading publisher sought to transition from a website to a platform. This would require them to integrate multiple data sources and understand user engagement with its content. It was imperative to understand how content was viewed, interacted with, and abandoned. Additionally, it was critical to understand how various users interacted with different types of content.
Leveraging SCUBA’s Decision Intelligence platform, this publisher gained a holistic, cross-channel view of performance and was able to monetize the power of their micro-audience data.
The results were transformative:
- 60% increase in user engagement per session: SCUBA’s insights helped this publisher identify which content resonated most with its audience.
- 20-second increase in time spent per session: By optimizing content placement based on data-driven insights, Bleacher Report was able to keep users engaged longer.
- Higher CPMs from video content: The platform quickly identified that video content drove more engagement, enabling Bleacher RepTort to capitalize on this insight for increased revenue.
These results underscore the power of Decision Intelligence. Rather than relying on costly Madtech and silo’d data, SCUBA enabled this customer to integrate data across channels, optimize content strategy, and ultimately drive higher engagement and revenue.
The Future of MadTech is Collaborative Decision Intelligence
Data clean rooms (DCRs) were an essential first step in addressing data-driven advertising in a privacy-centric world. However, their true role in the Madtech ecosystem is becoming increasingly clear. As the industry matures, so too must the clean room. Forward-thinking organizations are now turning to decision intelligence to maximize and future-proof their Madtech investments, demonstrating that the future lies in MadTech solutions that bridge the gap between technical and non-technical teams.
By adopting decision intelligence, the advertising industry can unlock the full potential of its data—driving growth, enhancing consumer experiences, and staying competitive in an ever-evolving, data-driven landscape. The bottom line? Clean rooms served their purpose, but it’s time to embrace a smarter, faster, and more scalable solution to power the future of advertising.
