LAS VEGAS — When you have a footprint the size of Disney’s, data collaboration is a necessity.
But the new privacy environment makes sharing audience data understandably limited.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Dana McGraw, SVP, Audience Modelling & Data Science, The Walt Disney Company, explains how new “clean room” software is moving the ad needle.
Clean room pillars
Clean room technology allows media buyers and sellers to match their consumer data without directly sharing it with each other – something which could breach the growing number of privacy laws.
McGraw says Disney has been “really thoughtful” about how it can benefit from the tools, settling on applications in three “pillars”, which it had implemented in phases:
- Planning and insights.
- Activation
- Measurement.
“Now it’s about, how do we broaden this?,” she says. “How do we scale it, how do we make it easier for brand clients and holding companies and agencies to work with us there?”
Partner projects
McGraw says Disney has been working with Omnicom to use its Disney Select, a programmatic platform it unveiled in 2021, including “2,000 off-the-shelf audiences” and a clean room.
She says: “We’re able to say, ‘Okay, that’s the audience that’s high-value to you. Here’s what that looks like. Here’s how that looks across our inventory. Here’s other places where that audience exists that you may not have been thinking about.’
“A real driving force around clean rooms, other than the obvious, has been CTV and streaming inventory and the need to understand across platforms, de-duplication.
“We’re able to do that with our audience graph in the clean room.”
McGraw’s team is also working with VideoAmp to improve measurement, aiming to answer questions like: “How are we able to sort of expose without delivering the data?”
She explains: “The clean room allows us to give them the visibility they need with no data exchanging hands for that measurement piece.”
Help to scale
McGraw says more companies in the space are maturing in their understanding of clean rooms, with help from vendors.
“I would say, in the last year, there’s been exponential improvement in understanding. I think definitely there’s been interest from the start – plenty of brands and agencies saying, ‘We get this, we know why this is important’.
“A company like Habu, who we work with often, we’ve found that working with them in this capacity has really helped expedite brands being able to be there, ready or not. It’s allowed that function to to get them up and running much faster.
“The appetite is there, the understanding is really evolved. And now it’s a matter of, how do you get up and running and scale it?”
You’re watching ‘Clean Rooms: Collaboration Goes Mainstream,’ a Beet.TV Leadership Series produced at CES 2023, presented by Habu. For more videos from this series, please visit this page. For all of our coverage from CES 2023, please click here.
