Media Buying Summit Day 3: Data clean rooms, transparency and future-proofing brands in a cookieless world

In essence, data clean rooms are compliant with both General Data Protection Regulation in the EU and the California Consumer Privacy Act, Tate explained. “It comes with limited access within the company, so that very few people can actually get into that,” Tate said.

Tate also discussed how customer data platforms and clean rooms can work together. She mentioned that Bounteous utilizes Adobe Experience Manager along with clean room technology in order to build out segmentation. And then they use the CDP to “leverage that segmentation as we look for customer securities… to be able to personalize the experience,” Tate said.

Stacey Stewart, U.S. chief marketplace officer at UMWW, continued the conversation around how to future-proof brands in a cookieless world and whether this change paves the way for contextual relevance. While there is still some debate as to whether cookies are going away completely, Stewart believes consumers are getting savvier in understanding how they are tracked.

“I think consumers have certainly gotten smarter over the years,” Stewart said. “That’s an important thing for all of us to realize is, getting consumers comfortable with understanding evaluations of what they’re getting in exchange for sharing our data with us and the value that they’ll see by getting the content on the internet is something that we all need to lean into and make sure that we’re proving out.”

At UM, Stewart mentioned actually adding a chief privacy officer as well as a privacy lead member on each account. These days, she said she believes many agencies are going to be spending more time working closely with legal — whether they like it or not. But with the appointment of a privacy officer, Stewart said they are able to quickly understand legalities in a practical way and see if they need to take action on it.

“Even something as simple as Roe v. Wade’s overturn, looking at all the apps that track people’s periods… and what does that mean for me? Am I advertising on those sites?” Stewart said.

Gogi Gupta, founder and CEO of Gupta Media, covered app tracking transparency and the best ways agencies can translate this success in a post-ATT environment. For Gupta, the constant education on metrics is key to communicating outcomes to leadership and partners, especially as we enter a potential recession.

“Now we come and say, you can’t really compare these apples to those apples even though they had to say the name, right?” Gupta told Digiday. “So we spend a lot of time telling clients how they should read the number and being very transparent about those numbers.”

Gupta also dove into the concept of perfection and how we are embracing a lo-fi authenticity in the post app-tracking world using platforms like Billo, a creator marketplace for user-generated videos. What worked on television was highly produced 30-second spots that were “perfect,” with great production and high cost, Gupta said. Yet on social media, whether it’s TikTok or Instagram, influencers have a huge sway with audiences and get deals — essentially allowing us to buy that influence without doing it in a very produced way, Gupta explained.

“They’re doing it in sort of a lo-fi, high authenticity, high emotional appeal way,” Gupta said. “People love the highly produced, but they really want utility, the lo-fi. As we continue to look for ways to bring creative that works online, [it’s this idea] that we will find them and build high-quality videos — some of these are $60, and they’re good.”