Roku announces clean room for streaming campaigns

Today, Roku announced a clean room that allows advertisers on the streaming platform to find and target CTV viewers they already have a relationship with through other channels. A clean room is a type of privacy-enhancing technology (PET). It is a secure environment in which personal data from various sources is anonymized and made available for measurement or activation without compromising privacy.

How it works. Planning and measurement capabilities in the Roku clean room use audience data from Roku’s viewers, as well as linear TV data from direct consumer relationships on Roku.

In the clean room, an advertiser loads their first-party data in a secure environment. Then, the clean room creates a secure connection between the advertiser’s data and Roku’s own data. During this process, no identifiable data from Roku viewers is exposed or shared.

The clean room in the Roku platform is built on top of Snowflake’s Media Data Cloud technologies.

Advertiser capabilities. Using this technology, advertisers have the ability to query matched data and run their own analysis to predict the reach of their campaigns and the impact the campaigns would have on product sales and other KPIs.

Agencies using the Roku clean room include Omnicom Media Group, dentsu, Horizon Media and others, according to a company release. The clean room is also integrated in Roku’s streaming ad platform, OneView.

Why we care. As cord-cutters turn to streaming, marketers have to pick up the conversation with their brand’s audience in an entirely different environment. The problem is that these consumers want to be served relevant ads but they also don’t want to be tracked in a creepy way.

Clean rooms show that this is a problem for technology to solve. In a secure environment, the viewer data can be matched with what the brand already has, without divulging the viewer’s personal identifying information.

The introduction of a clean room on a top streaming platform like Roku is another indication of how the CTV landscape is maturing and becoming a major channel for big brand campaigns.

Read next: Marketers look to adtech to solve for addressability 

About The Author

Chris Wood draws on over 15 years of reporting experience as a B2B editor and journalist. At DMN, he served as associate editor, offering original analysis on the evolving marketing tech landscape. He has interviewed leaders in tech and policy, from Canva CEO Melanie Perkins, to former Cisco CEO John Chambers, and Vivek Kundra, appointed by Barack Obama as the country’s first federal CIO. He is especially interested in how new technologies, including voice and blockchain, are disrupting the marketing world as we know it. In 2019, he moderated a panel on “innovation theater” at Fintech Inn, in Vilnius. In addition to his marketing-focused reporting in industry trades like Robotics Trends, Modern Brewery Age and AdNation News, Wood has also written for KIRKUS, and contributes fiction, criticism and poetry to several leading book blogs. He studied English at Fairfield University, and was born in Springfield, Massachusetts. He lives in New York.