
With the announced deprecation of third-party cookies and the need to adopt, in marketing and advertising, privacy-first models and practices, the “data clean room” is increasingly emerging as an attractive solution capable of mediating between the need for evolved profiling and audience enrichment activities, on the one hand, and data protection on the other.
Before learning about its features and functionality in detail, however, let us take a step back, trying to reconstruct its history and evolution.
- Data clean room: between past and future
- Data clean room: what and what benefits?
- Blendee data clean room: data operations with full respect for privacy
- Data clean room: use case
Data clean room: between past and future
Data clean rooms, as an infrastructural solution, have existed for a number of years: in 2017, Google, with ADS Data Hub, was the first big player to launch the data clean room in the market, pursuing as its goal to enable advertisers audience enrichment activities by matching, in a secure and private environment, proprietary data with those of the Google ecosystem. In the months and years that followed, the evolution of data clean rooms increasingly affected walled gardens, from Facebook to Amazon, which, respectively, launched their data clean rooms between 2017 and 2019. But it was 2018 that officially kicked off the era of privacy: GDPR, CCPA, not to mention Apple’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention 2.0 have, in fact, turned the spotlight on the need to preserve privacy and protect users’ personal data, thus also opening the market to the development of data clean room solutions also by third parties and independent companies. But what is a data clean room? Let’s clarify!
Data Clean Room: what is it and what are the benefits?
Hailed by many as the “Switzerland of data,” the data clean room is defined in the guidelines provided by IAB TechLab as “a secure collaboration environment that allows two or more participants to leverage data resources for specific and mutually agreed upon uses, while ensuring that strict data access limitations are enforced.” In other words, a data clean room acts as a kind of intermediary between two different stakeholders who choose to deploy data collaboration strategies and activities aimed at increasing their source audiences. For data collaboration activities to be possible, it is necessary that all parties involved are protected with regard to the processing of personal data and information. In this context, the data clean room offers maximum protection: here, data, defined as PII, of the parties involved is collected, analyzed, and used to perform matching activities, but it is never explicitly exchanged, such that it can never be traced back to a unique identifier and thus traced to a single user.

In advertising and marketing, the benefits of adopting a data clean room are therefore considerable.
- Data security: as anticipated, a data clean room provides a highly secure environment where sensitive data and information are accessible only to authorized parties. Access, data availability are agreed upon by all parties involved and the data governance itself is enforced by the service provider so that there can be no de facto direct access by one company to the data of the other.
- Effective collaboration: companies can collaborate and work together to create more effective marketing strategies based on data shared in the data clean room. This leads to greater synergy and better planning of advertising campaigns.
- Greater control over information: companies using a data clean room maintain control over their data, deciding what information to share and with whom. This ensures that customer data is used responsibly, in line with privacy regulations and compliance

Blendee data clean room: data operations with full respect for privacy
Blendee’s data clean room is a protected and secure digital space in which to activate collaborations without exchanging data, while fully respecting privacy.
In fact, the data and audience information remain the property of the company using Blendee’s data clean room at all times.
Blendee’s data clean room is a temporary environment that is activated when two players need to do certain actions on the data.
The clean room provides players with a temporary encryption key that is valid only for the single operation. Strong user IDs (email phone number, loyalty card number, mobile ID) are encrypted with a private encryption key inside data bunkers and transmitted, later, to the data clean room. Once the operation is completed, the keys are no longer valid and the information returns to the direct owner, without being given to third parties.
Data clean room: use case
ata enrichment, data extension and data activation: there are mainly three operations for which companies can use Blendee’s data clean room. Let’s analyze them in detail.
- Data enrichment: you can enrich your audience data by partnering with audience providers on the platform. Blendee’s ID graph makes available the company’s data-matching and data volume overlays with different audience providers in order to allow you to choose the partner that best fits your business goals.
- Data extension: you can deliver advertising campaigns directly to selected audiences provided by audience providers based on your business goals.
- Data activation: you can run campaigns on your first-party data in secure environments directly connected to publishers. Audience activation is done in encrypted mode via the data clean room.
Data clean rooms are, to date, undoubtedly an attractive solution for a cookieless advertising ecosystem, but there are still important open challenges that mainly concern the adoption of an ethical approach and a culture of data.