AWS announces AWS Clean Rooms

At AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services, Inc., an Amazon.com company, announced AWS Clean Rooms, a new analytics service that helps companies across industries easily and securely analyze and collaborate on their combined datasets—without sharing or revealing underlying data. With AWS Clean Rooms, customers can create a secure data clean room in minutes and collaborate with any other company in the AWS Cloud to generate unique insights about advertising campaigns, investment decisions, clinical research, and more. AWS Clean Rooms provides a broad set of built-in data access controls that protect sensitive data, including query controls, query output restrictions, query logging, and cryptographic computing tools. To learn more, visit aws.amazon.com/clean-rooms.

Companies across multiple industries increasingly look to complement their data with external business partners’ data to build a complete view of their business. In the advertising industry, for example, brands, media publishers, and their partners need to collaborate using datasets that are stored across many different channels and applications to improve the relevance of their campaigns and better engage with consumers. At the same time, these companies also want to protect sensitive consumer information and reduce or eliminate the sharing of raw data. To achieve this, one company often has to provide a copy of their user-level data to their partners and rely on contractual agreements to prevent misuse. Data clean rooms can help solve this challenge by allowing multiple parties to combine and analyze their data in a protected environment, where participants are unable to see each other’s raw data. But clean rooms are hard to build, requiring complex privacy controls, specialized tools to protect each participant’s data, and months of development time customizing analytics tools. When a new collaborator is added, or a different type of analysis is needed, companies have to spend even more development time. Then, these companies repeatedly have to copy and upload their data into storage environments outside of their control, which increases costs and risks exposing sensitive information. Companies prefer to limit data movement as much as possible, usually leading to less collaboration and missed opportunities to generate new business insights.

AWS Clean Rooms is a new service that makes it easier for customers and their partners to analyze and collaborate on their collective datasets to gain new insights, without revealing underlying data. Customers can use AWS Clean Rooms to create their own clean rooms in minutes and to start analyzing their collective datasets with just a few clicks. From the AWS Management Console, customers can simply choose the partners with whom they want to collaborate, select their datasets, and configure restrictions for participants. With AWS Clean Rooms, customers can easily collaborate with companies that are already using AWS, without moving data out of their AWS environment or loading it into another platform. When customers run queries, AWS Clean Rooms reads data where it lives and applies built-in analysis rules to help them maintain control over their data. Additionally, AWS Clean Rooms provides a broad set of configurable data access controls—including query controls, query output restrictions, and query logging—that allow companies to customize restrictions on the queries run by each clean room participant. AWS Clean Rooms also includes advanced cryptographic computing tools that keep data encrypted, even as queries are processed, to comply with stringent data-handling policies.

“Customers tell us they want to collaborate more safely and securely with their partners in areas like advertising, media, financial services, and life sciences. However, the data they need to do this is fragmented across data stores and applications belonging to different partners,” said Dilip Kumar, vice president of AWS Applications. “AWS Clean Rooms helps customers and their partners to better analyze and collaborate on their data on AWS. With the launch of AWS Clean Rooms, we are making it easier, simpler, and more secure for multiple companies to share and analyze combined datasets to generate new insights that they could not do on their own. Using AWS Clean Rooms, customers can collaborate on a range of tasks, such as more effectively generating advertising campaign insights and analyzing investment data while improving data security.”

In the coming months, AWS will also introduce new identity resolution capabilities to help businesses match and link customer records stored across disparate channels without the need to build and maintain complex workflows. Customers will have access to flexible, preconfigured identity resolution workflows that use rule-based techniques and machine learning models to help accurately link consumer interactions across applications into a unique user ID. With identity resolution capabilities, customers can create a unified view of their interactions with consumers. For example, a customer working on an advertising campaign could incorporate recent events (e.g., ad clicks, cart abandonment, and purchases) into advertising and marketing applications (e.g., ad buying platforms, loyalty programs, and ecommerce systems) to create better, more relevant consumer experiences. Customers who want to collaborate with other partners in a clean room can use automated identity resolution workflows that identify common user IDs across datasets and help them more easily join data together.

AWS Clean Rooms is available as a standalone offering and as part of AWS for Advertising and Marketing, a comprehensive set of solutions for advertising agencies, advertising technology companies, brands, and media publishers to accelerate and improve advertising and marketing campaign effectiveness. AWS for Advertising and Marketing includes solutions for privacy-enhanced data collaboration, advertising intelligence and measurement, audience and customer data management, real-time advertising, and customer experience.

AWS Clean Rooms will be available in early 2023 in US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Ireland), Europe (London), and Europe (Stockholm).

Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) is a secure, privacy-safe clean room application from Amazon Ads that supports thousands of marketers with custom analytics and cross-channel analysis. Builders can utilize AMC APIs to create their own offerings, while analysts can interact with a user interface available through the Amazon Ad Console. “Providing marketers with greater control over their own signals, while being able to analyze them in conjunction with signals from Amazon Ads, is crucial in today’s marketing landscape,” said Paula Despins, vice president of Ads Measurement at Amazon Ads. “By migrating AMC’s compute infrastructure to AWS Clean Rooms under the hood, marketers can use their own signals in AMC without moving data out of their AWS environment. This simplifies how marketers can manage their signals and enables AMC teams to focus on building new capabilities for brands.”

Comscore is a measurement and analytics company that brings trust and transparency to media. “As advertisers and marketers adapt to deliver relevant campaigns leveraging their combined datasets while protecting consumer data, Comscore’s Media Metrix suite, powered by Unified Digital Measurement 2.0, and Campaign Ratings services, will continue to support critical measurement and planning needs with services like AWS Clean Rooms,” said Brian Pugh, chief information officer at Comscore. “AWS Clean Rooms will enable new methods of collaboration among media owners, brands, or agency customers through customized data access controls, managed and set by each data owner, without needing to share underlying data.”

DISH Media provides advertisers with intelligent solutions to efficiently maximize exposure to desired audiences across DISH TV and SLING TV. “At DISH Media, we empower brands and agencies to run their own analysis of prior campaigns to allow for flexibility, visibility, and ease in optimizing future campaigns to reach DISH Media’s 31 million consumers,” said Kemal Bokhari, head of Data, Measurement, and Analytics at DISH Media. “We believe advertisers will benefit from the ease-of-use and comprehensive data access controls of AWS Clean Rooms for the measurement and optimization of campaigns.”

Experian is the world’s leading global information services company. “As marketers and advertisers seek to maximize the value of their first-party data across a growing number of consumer touchpoints, our customers want solutions that enable them to effectively and securely interact with their partners,” said Aimee Irwin, senior vice president of Strategy and Partnerships at Experian. “By combining Experian’s identity resolution capabilities with AWS Clean Rooms, customers can securely unify and analyze their collective data to derive deeper insights and deliver more personalized customer experiences.”

Fox Corporation is a leading producer and distributor of ad-supported content through its sports, news, and entertainment brands. “It can be challenging for our advertising clients to determine how to best leverage our deep, differentiated set of data sources to optimize their media spend across our combined portfolio of entertainment, sports, and news brands, which reach hundreds of millions of monthly viewers,” said Lindsay Silver, senior vice president of Data and Commercial Technology at Fox Corporation. “AWS Clean Rooms will enable data collaborations easily and securely in the AWS Cloud, which will help our advertising clients unlock new insights across every Fox brand and screen while protecting consumer data.”

LiveRamp is a leading data collaboration platform that helps connect, control, and activate data. “As the marketing and advertising industry prepares for the future of privacy-first addressability, our customers are seeking to integrate identity into their existing cloud data infrastructure,” said Katrina Cho, head of Cloud Partnerships at LiveRamp. “By combining LiveRamp’s identity resolution capabilities with AWS Clean Rooms and its robust suite of privacy-enhancing data access controls, our customers can more accurately measure and collaborate to discover the powerful insights that drive more relevant customer experiences.”

Omnicom Media Group’s Annalect, a leading marketing services agency, helps brands orchestrate better outcomes using data, technology, and analytics. “Today, it is increasingly challenging for marketers and their partners to collaborate on their collective data assets to deliver personalized customer experiences and measure marketing outcomes,” said Anna Nicanorova, chief technology officer at Annalect. “With AWS Clean Rooms, Annalect enables advertisers to collaborate securely with media partners and advertising companies, facilitating planning, activation, and measurement with data access controls to safeguard their data. AWS Clean Rooms supports Annalect’s goal to provide our customers with privacy-enhancing collaboration tools that help drive marketing outcomes more effectively.”

Neustar, a TransUnion company, is a leading information services company that specializes in identity resolution solutions. “By making Neustar Unified Identity available in AWS Clean Rooms, we empower our customers to collaborate securely and at scale with their partners on their first-party datasets, enabling better match rates to drive stronger marketing outcomes,” said Ryan Engle, vice president of Identity Solutions at Neustar. “With AWS Clean Rooms, we will meet our customers where they are in the AWS Cloud, pairing our identity capabilities with AWS Clean Rooms’ privacy-enhancing data access controls.” BCS Bureau