How decision intelligence bridges the gap between clean rooms and decisions

Sponsored by SCUBA • September 20, 2024 •

alien ship picking up the letters d a t a. representing martech, data clean rooms and digital advertising.

Tony Ayaz, president and CEO, SCUBA

As the digital advertising industry pivots into a privacy-first era, marketers are searching for innovative data solutions to navigate this new landscape. Among these solutions, data clean rooms have emerged as the answer for privacy-driven intelligence.

Legacy data management approaches are applied to data clean rooms, and have been misinterpreted as the only path forward. However, data clean rooms are simply the starting point for first-party data, not the complete panacea the industry hoped for.

Despite the promise, data clean rooms are falling short

The IAB’s 2023 State of Data report maintained that although data clean room adoption is growing, the industry is struggling to unlock its full potential and achieve ROI.

There are several challenges with clean rooms that reduce their ROI. There are the hidden costs of the privacy infrastructure itself. Deloitte estimates that the average cost is $879,000, yet only one-third of clean rooms are used extensively. As infrastructure, not martech, data clean rooms bear significant IT dependencies. After paying for the infrastructure, clean rooms necessitate a costly and labor intensive setup.

Fully configured clean rooms still lack support for time-series data, which captures the fast-paced flow of digital interactions; this data forms the foundation of all online activity. It is through harnessing time-series data that the media industry can unlock value, which clean rooms can’t do alone.

Decision intelligence is the missing link between data and decisions

Decision intelligence is an important connector between data collaboration and actionable insights. It is the ability to make informed, data-driven decisions in real time while leveraging advanced analytics and machine learning to facilitate insights and extract value from data. Decision intelligence is not just about providing more data or better analytics; it’s about providing a complete solution that enables users to make informed decisions quickly and easily.

While clean rooms offer marketers and IT teams a secure space to house data, they only address part of the equation – sanitizing first-party data. The next step is enriching and activating data in real time, which provides the rich insights marketers need to grow audiences and measure outcomes. Clean room solutions will, therefore, need to be augmented with decision intelligence.

Decision intelligence platforms, such as SCUBA, help fill this gap by offering immediate, actionable insights, secure collaboration across ecosystems, enhanced ID graph support, and flexible integrations that can be used for activation.

How Bleacher Report leveraged decision intelligence to drive revenue

Bleacher Report tapped SCUBA’s decision intelligence platform to gain a holistic, cross-channel view of performance and monetize the power of its micro-audience data. This effort was part of the publisher’s evolution from a traditional website to a dynamic, data-driven platform.

The transformation required unifying diverse data sources to gain comprehensive insights into user engagement. Understanding how content was consumed, interacted with and, ultimately, abandoned became crucial. Additionally, it was vital to analyze how different user segments engaged with varying types of content, ensuring a more personalized and impactful experience.

With the help of SCUBA’s insights, Bleacher Report identified which content resonated most with its audience, leading to a 60% increase in user engagement per session. Optimizing content placement based on data-driven insights contributed to a 20-second increase in time spent per session — indicating that the publication was able to keep users engaged longer.

Finally, Bleacher Report capitalized on these insights for increased revenue from advertisers. By identifying videos that drove more engagement, the publisher was able to earn higher CPMs for video content.

These results underscore the impact of decision intelligence. Rather than relying on fragmented and costly clean rooms, SCUBA enabled Bleacher Report to integrate data across channels, optimize content strategy and drive higher engagement and revenue.

Collaborative decision intelligence is the future of martech

Data clean rooms are a critical step in the evolution of data privacy and collaboration, but their limitations are more apparent as the advertising industry matures. The future lies in a purpose-built solution for martech and ad tech that brings the technically skilled and non-technically skilled closer together.

By embracing decision intelligence, the advertising industry can unlock the full potential of data, drive growth, enhance consumer experiences and stay ahead of the competition in an increasingly data-driven world.