‘Clean Rooms are Driving Data

SALISBURY, CT — In an industry where companies want to go on integrating customer data sets despite new privacy rules, clean room technology is emerging as the new backbone of the business.

This is the view of Matt Kilmartin, Co-founder and CEO of Habu, a company with a focus on privacy-safe data solutions.

In this video interview with Mike Shields for Beet.TV, Kilmartin explains why clean rooms have garnered so much attention.

Clean rooms provide the necessary permissions and governance to ensure safe, secure data collaboration. They offer a way for businesses to match up their data without sharing the information or intermingling it.

In the last two years, the software has been much-talked-about and well adopted by companies who want to do just that.

“To be able to measure and to deliver data-driven advertising, you have to be using clean rooms,” Kilmartin explains. “The days of people streaming log-level data or mobile identifiers or pixels, those days are a hundred percent over.”

According to Kilmartin, the only way to access the essential data for advertising is by operating within your partner’s data environment. “Clean rooms really are the infrastructure which is going to be driving all of data-driven advertising,” he asserts.

Kilmartin is a strong advocate for open systems, a principle he and his team at Habu decided on from day one.

“People choose collaboration partners based on common business interest,” he says. “They don’t choose collaboration partners because (for example) we’re both on the same LiveRamp id or we’re both on the same cloud stack.”

By operating on an open system, Kilmartin argues that data owners, retailers, media companies and brands have the opportunity to collaborate with a wider array of partners.

“You need an open system where you can collaborate with a partner no matter what identity spine they might be using or no matter what cloud they might be on,” Kilmartin points out.

Habu was co-founded by Kilmartin and Mike Moreau to enable data collaboration in a world of walled gardens and privacy imperatives.

It supports privacy and governance, plus data collaboration, across a range of data locations, including cloud providers, media platforms, identity systems, activation suites and more.

The company offers data clean room services, allowing companies to combine, integrate and derive insights from data in a privacy-compliant manner.

Kilmartin notes that the ability to measure ad incrementality through clean room technology is a hot topic among brands and agencies. “It’s coming up and we’ve actually seen some smart customers solve it,” he says.

He cites the example of the job site Indeed, which has conducted sophisticated incrementality measurement using Disney’s clean room, another Habu customer.

Kilmartin believes that retail media spending and clean room technology are naturally converging.

“If you’re buying something at Home Depot, do you really want Home Depot sharing that data with all these different companies?” he asks. “And if you worked at Home Depot, would you really be sharing that transaction data with your partners?”

The solution, Kilmartin suggests, lies in using clean room technology to share data in a privacy-safe way that benefits both the retailer and the consumer. “There’s a way to do it in a privacy safe way, which is better for Home Depot and it’s better for consumers as well,” he concludes.

You’re watching coverage of Beet Retreat Berkshires, our latest Retreat in Salisbury, Connecticut — presented by Magnite, KERV & TransUnion. For more videos from this event, pleasevisit this page.