New Lookalike Clean Rooms boost reach with first-party data

First-party lookalikes bring better reach and better accuracy

With the launch of Lookalike Clean Rooms, we’re introducing a new way to run effective, high-reach display campaigns based on first-party data. In the clean room, an AI model combines brand and publisher data to build ideal audiences. Using information about a brand’s most valuable customers, the model seeks out similar, high-potential individuals in the publisher’s audience to address even the most hard-to-reach personas.

Traditional retargeting methods limit total audiences to matched users shared between publisher and brand, typically a low share of the total audience. Our lookalikes are significantly more effective: they extend the reach of your campaign beyond the overlap, selecting users from the entirety of the publisher’s audience.

The Lookalike clean rooms allow brands to collaborate with publishers without disclosing their customer data to the publisher, lowering compliance barriers substantially. As with every Decentriq clean room, your data stays in your control, verifiably inaccessible to any other party — including us.

This newest addition to the Decentriq platform combines advanced AI and machine learning with deep privacy and security measures, rigorous enough to convince even the most regulated organizations, including banks, pharmaceutical companies, and the Swiss Army.

‍

Lookalike activation is just a few clicks away

Our goal is to make it as simple as possible for brands and publishers to collaborate for more effective campaigns, without sacrificing privacy. Now, creating high-performing lookalike audiences with first-party data is possible in just a few clicks.

We designed an array of features that work together to remove friction from first-party activations:

• Marketers can run the entire activation workflow from a visual interface — no technical expertise needed
• Teams can explore insights about audience overlap in clear and detailed dashboards, helping inform campaign strategy
• Data privacy compliance is a given with privacy-preserving lookalikes and end-to-end encryption
• Because lookalike reach is not tied to matched users between publisher and brands, there’s no need for expensive ID graphs.
• Built-in integrations with leading CRMs, CDPs, and ad servers

4 steps to reaching your best audience and increasing ROAS:

• Select the premium publisher(s) you want to advertise on and connect your first-party data to the clean room
• Explore insights about the overlap with the publisher’s audience. Learn about your customers’ affinities and demographics based on the publisher’s data.
• Train an AI lookalike model based on combined data — while the data stays encrypted
• Send an AI-generated audience to the publisher and activate

How the data clean room uses AI to build advanced lookalikes

The Lookalike Clean Room matches brand data against publisher data to create a seed audience inside the clean room. Instead of exporting this matched audience directly, this seed audience is used to train an AI model to find other users with similar traits across all of the publisher’s inventory — not just matched users.

Competing solutions typically offer either weaker privacy protections — often none at all — or they’re limited in how they can process the data due to their choice of technology.

Our application of confidential computing and other privacy technologies provides privacy protections so strong, that it has enabled many of our highly-regulated customers to use their first-party data for the first time. At the same time, confidential computing gives us enough flexibility to choose from the best possible AI models to provide our customers the best results.

Putting power and reach back in the hands of brands and publishers

Demand-side targeting by DSPs in the open web is getting worse by the day. DSPs rely on conversion information and third-party data to optimize the targeting of a campaign. Without cookies, they lose access to both, leaving them blind and making them waste large shares of advertisers’ budgets on irrelevant users.

While this puts pressure on brands to find new methods to target effectively, it also creates a unique chance for publishers and brands to take back control of the display advertising market. When publishers and brands work together, using their first-party data in new ways to target and reach audiences, they can pave a new path for relevant, effective campaigns.

Lookalike Clean Rooms are a practical way for publishers and brands to beat the third-party cookie crunch today. And with confidential computing creating an ultra-secure foundation for collaboration, they can work together with the assurance that compliance with data protection regulations is a given.

Because of how our platform enforces data protection at the deepest technical level, some of the largest publisher networks in Europe have already decided to input their most sensitive targeting data, previously reserved for internal use only.

We’re excited to help drive the digital advertising ecosystem towards a world that’s more private, but still effective. The future of digital advertising goes beyond walled gardens, and we’re working with our customers to shape it — while keeping user data safe.

Check out a demo of the new Lookalike Clean Room, or contact us to discuss how your first-party data could be the key to more efficient campaigns.