DIGIXX 2023: Exploring the implications of Data Clean Rooms in the Martech ecosystem

The digital world is rapidly evolving, and the 7th edition of DIGIXX Summit & Awards, organised by Adgully, was aimed at exploring this transformation with its theme, ‘Virtual to Real – The Great Digital Transformation.’

DIGIXX Summit & Awards 2023 saw the launch of a special White Paper by Wavmaker and Adgully on Data Clean Rooms. Conversations on Data Clean Rooms have been sweeping the Martech ecosystem globally in recent times, and it is time to delve into this world and understand its full implications.

The session was chaired by Ronak Parikh, Head of Data and Technology, Wavemaker India, and the panellists included:

Anisha Bangera, Senior Manager, MarTech, Luminous India

Abhishek Jain, Marketing Science Lead, Google

Swastika Johorey, Head IT (Ecommerce, Digital Marketing and Data), Reckitt

Nimish Agrawal, Senior Vice President, Head of Marketing, Niva Bupa

Tabrez Alam, Chief Data and Strategy Officer - Data Strategies, Bobble AI

Commencing the discussions, Ronak Parikh said: "Gartner predicts that 80% of marketers with media budgets of more than one billion dollars will adopt data clean rooms by 2023. 87% of Indians have concerns actually around organisations the way they're using sensitive information; so privacy is a huge concern. 84% of Indian consumers prefer brands and organisations and what they are doing and the efforts they are taking to protect their data. So this is of paramount importance as far as consumers are concerned”
Further defining the data clean rooms, Bobble AI’s Tabrez Alam used the analogy of parking money in Swiss bank without your name being disclosed.
"Data clean room is just a Switzerland of data. Nothing else holds your data in a most privacy-compliant manner. The best part is that this like a very secure chamber."

Niva Bupa’s Nimish Agrawal remarked: "One of our biggest challenges is how to educate our people about GDPR because, from a health insurance industry perspective, still 85% of business is conducted offline and only 15% of the business is online. This is because most of the people in the industry are engaged in advisory business, which means they're speaking to an agent or relationship manager rather than a customer service representative."

"One of the largest challenges the business and industry face is educating the public about the dangers of sending information over email and the dire need to avoid using WhatsApp," Nimish added.

According to Agrawal, a lot of these things happened in Europe. And as marketeers work on a lot of global platforms we are forced to understand what data privacy is. He feels that there should be a democratic understanding of what data privacy is and what is okay and what's not okay.

The first thing you need to know is where you are in the process of structuring your data, points out Reckitt’s Swastika Johorey.

"We started by actually starting the process of obtaining first-party data for all of our brands, because, in the past, data for our various brands and websites was stored separately because of how we operated. As a result, whenever we wanted to carry out a market activation, we would have to transfer data from one data storage and push it against a wall. But because it wasn't the right thing to do, we first implemented CDP. However, CDP doesn't address our real measurement of how my campaigns are performing, and because we work across networks, it's very challenging to gain insights from all of the market activations we conduct. As a result, I believe that something like a data clean room would address this issue for brands that are still in the early stages of their customer journeys. We recently introduced CDP, and now we're examining how we can truly customise experiences with tools like DCO etc, which is not feasible if the data path is not particularly structured,” she explains.

These are edited excerpts. For the complete conversation, watch below: