The Key to Standardizing Food Retail Media: Clean Data Rooms

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During Wednesday’s roundtable on retail media hosted by the Interactive Advertising Bureau, experts said clean data rooms could prove to be key to standardizing retail media and seamless data collaboration for both retailers and advertisers.

Establishing consistent measurement metrics for ad campaigns remains a hurdle for the industry as retail media capabilities evolve rapidly. And while it’s not a new practice, the move toward using clean rooms will help strengthen data collaboration across the industry and facilitate consistent measurement, providing a more comprehensive picture of ad campaign effectiveness, panelists said.

Data clean rooms are safe, controlled spaces where multiple companies can compile data for joint analysis. Advertisers can then compare these data sets to determine if they are reaching the right audience with their ads.

Many retailers, including grocers, have already embraced cleanrooms. Evan Hovorka, vice president of product innovation for Albertsons Media Collective, said the grocer is primarily using cleanrooms to see how it can expand on various retail media initiatives and implement strategies across its multiple banners.

“If we’re going to work directly with an agency or brand that wants to promote shoppable ad blocks (for example), we better find a way to seamlessly support all of those unique banners, in-stock items, and priced items—clean rooms can make that possible,” he said.

Kavita Cariapa, senior vice president and head of commerce for activations at Dentsu, noted that cleanrooms allow for collaboration on measurement methodologies, and retailers have the opportunity to explain to their consumer goods partners how a campaign performed at scale.

However, the collaboration can extend beyond a single retailer and advertiser.

If all retailers could adopt a standardization framework for every major retail media story — something agencies already have — consumer goods manufacturers who sell their products in dozens of different retail outlets wouldn’t have to use different methodologies and frameworks to determine the success of their advertising campaigns, Hovorka said.

He added that once the cleanroom standardization approach is implemented, retailers will need to discuss only those ad campaign use cases that best align with the needs of their consumer goods partner.

While individual retailers are developing closed-loop measurement capabilities across their networks, the missing piece is consistency, which makes multi-retailer partnerships a headache for brand partners, according to Hovorka. And it doesn’t matter if one retailer’s methodology is better than another’s if all the metrics are different, he noted.

“(Clean rooms) may limit the possibilities and flexibility a little bit, but it will make scale, consistency and the sanity of our customers a lot easier to achieve,” Hovorka said. “So I’m excited about the level of adoption that we have to get now to standardize clean rooms.”