As the advertising ecosystem faces new regulations and increasing pressure to strengthen consumer privacy controls, many brands are turning to data clean rooms as a critical foundational solution. Data clean rooms provide a highly secure environment for multiple companies, or divisions of a single company, to collaborate with and across data sets for the purposes of identity, enrichment, joint analysis, targeting, or media measurement in a privacy-safe way. 

At Snowflake, we are seeing this type of collaboration develop across industry verticals, but it’s particularly accelerating in the marketing and advertising landscape. Companies use Snowflake’s platform to power these new data clean rooms and design the level of transparency and privacy controls that are appropriate to enable data interoperability with their partners and customers, while maintaining data security and governance. This allows every customer to create its own data network within the Snowflake Data Cloud for advertising collaboration that is unique to its business requirements. 

NBCUniversal Launches the NBCU Audience Insights Hub

In an industry-leading example, later this year existing Snowflake customer NBCUniversal will launch the NBCU Audience Insights Hub, built on a cross-cloud data clean room environment powered by Snowflake that will unlock data interoperability between NBCUniversal and its advertising ecosystem partners. The new solution will enable NBCUniversal to feed its first-party audience data, which advertising partners will then be able to safely and securely join with their own respective data sets, without moving, copying, or exposing any underlying personally identifiable information (PII). Snowflake’s framework will let NBCUniversal and its partners govern what data is housed in the clean room, how data can be joined, what types of analyses each party can perform on the data, and what data, if any, can leave the clean room. The approach is distinct from other privacy sandboxes in that it lets the participants design the level of protection and transparency that is appropriate for building audiences, activating campaigns, or measurement. 

Importantly, once NBCUniversal’s Audience Insights Hub goes live with its clean room powered by Snowflake, Snowflake customers who are advertisers will have the ability to engage NBCUniversal about a potential integration for data collaboration. 

The new, first-to-market capabilities of the NBCU Audience Insights Hub include:

  • Digital audience exploration: In NBCUniversal’s new centralized clean room environment, partners will be able to explore how audiences and customers overlap, providing valuable aggregate insights without any underlying data exposed from either party. This will enable brand and agency partners to better find and understand their customers to drive results while keeping viewer information safe.
  • Cross-platform planning: NBCUniversal will combine the new clean room environment with its proprietary Linear TV APIs, giving partners self-service access, for the first time ever, to NBCUniversal’s aggregate linear and digital data — all the necessary ingredients needed for cross-platform media planning — in one integration.
  • Reach and frequency measurement: The new hub will incorporate certified reach measurement models, which will enable partners to utilize ad exposure data and conduct their own analyses, providing the ability to deduplicate campaign reach and frequency for more efficient media planning and measurement.
  • Cross-platform attribution: NBCUniversal will continue to extend its interoperable measurement capabilities, enabling partners to conduct their own self-service multi-platform attribution. In the long-term, this will unlock always-on closed-loop attribution capabilities for every campaign.

As the media ecosystem braces itself for a future without the third-party cookies typically relied upon for campaign performance and attribution modeling, data clean rooms such as the NBCU Audience Insights Hub will provide a privacy-safe way to not only plan campaigns but to also measure their impact. In the long term, data clean rooms may hold the key to unlocking always-on closed-loop attribution capabilities for every advertising campaign.

  • Register for Snowflake Summit to attend NBCUniversal and Capgemini’s session and learn how media, agency, and technology firms are using data clean rooms to collaborate on the Data Cloud.