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Data Clean Room
Data Clean Room
A data clean room (DCR) is a secure, privacy-controlled environment that enables two or more organisations to run joint analysis on their combined datasets without either party exposing underlying raw data to the other. Queries return aggregate outputs only — "answers, not records" — meaning user-level data never crosses the collaboration boundary. In ecommerce and retail media, DCRs allow retailers, brands, and platforms to measure advertising effectiveness and build audiences using first-party data, without violating privacy regulations or exposing proprietary customer records.
How it works
According to the IAB Europe Blueprint for Clean Rooms (produced from the IAB Europe Retail Media Impact Summit, September 2025), all data clean rooms share one core requirement: zero permanent copy of data. Retailers and brands each hold their data in separate, controlled environments; the DCR runs computation at the intersection without transferring raw records between parties.
The IAB Europe Blueprint identifies two structural categories:
- Infrastructure DCRs — operate directly in cloud infrastructure (e.g. Snowflake Clean Rooms, AWS Clean Rooms, Google Ads Data Hub, Amazon Marketing Cloud)
- Application DCRs — built on top of infrastructure, by the same cloud provider or a third-party SaaS vendor (e.g. LiveRamp, Decentriq, InfoSum/WPP)
DigitalApplied (June 2026) groups them into three commercial flavours:
- Walled-garden platform DCRs — free, platform-provided, ecosystem-locked (Google Ads Data Hub, Amazon Marketing Cloud, Meta Advanced Analytics)
- Neutral cloud DCRs — powerful, requires SQL/data engineering, billed by compute (Snowflake, AWS Clean Rooms, Databricks)
- Clean-room-as-a-service — lower technical lift, higher SaaS fees (LiveRamp, Decentriq)
Google Ads Data Hub requires a minimum of 50 users per query before returning a result row — enforcing a re-identification floor (as-of June 2026, DigitalApplied). Amazon Marketing Cloud provides a 25-month signal lookback window and, as of September 2025, became free to all Sponsored Ads advertisers, removing the prior DSP-only barrier (as-of September 2025, per DigitalApplied June 2026).
The IAB Europe Blueprint identifies interoperability as the most significant structural challenge: "Clean rooms do not speak to each other; they are on different protocols because clouds are built differently."
Use cases in ecommerce and retail media
The IAB Europe Blueprint (September 2025) names two primary use cases for retail media:
- Audience building and activation — matching a retailer's first-party purchaser segments with a brand's own CRM data to identify overlap, build lookalike audiences, and activate them across media channels
- Measurement and insights — closed-loop attribution connecting campaign exposure to actual sales; frequency capping across walled gardens; cross-channel reach and deduplication
The IAB (Jeffrey Bustos, April 2023, updated November 2025) identifies four named use cases: relevant advertising/targeting using anonymised customer data; audience segmentation by purchase history and browsing behaviour; attribution modelling connecting marketing touchpoints to conversions and ROAS; and inventory management and demand forecasting — the last attributed to Snowflake-partner deployments connecting online/in-store sales to media investment and demand planning.
IAB blog (April 2023, updated November 2025) — named case studies remain valid as illustrative examples but adoption and platform capabilities have evolved significantly since original publication.
Skai (2025 State of Retail Media) notes the use-case horizon is shifting: from "prove it worked" (basic attribution) toward "where next" — incrementality testing, share-of-wallet analysis, and channel planning (as-of Q1 2025).
Adam Solomon, LiveRamp VP (AdExchanger, January 7, 2026): "Clean rooms are 'under the hood' in retail media arrangements — advertisers may not even be aware of them."
Key vendors and platforms
| Vendor | Type | Notable for |
|---|---|---|
| Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) | Walled-garden | Free to all Sponsored Ads advertisers since Sept 2025; 25-month lookback; AI-assisted querying (no SQL required via web UI) (as-of June 2026) |
| Google Ads Data Hub | Walled-garden | 50-user minimum per query; GCP-native |
| Meta Advanced Analytics | Walled-garden | Limited beta as of June 2026; waitlist-gated; vendor-stated beta results: 14% incremental revenue lift for travel brands, 42% lower-funnel effectiveness increase for beverage brands — not independently audited |
| Snowflake Clean Rooms | Neutral cloud | Fortune 500 adoption; three-way retailer/brand/publisher collaboration supported; compute-billed |
| AWS Clean Rooms | Neutral cloud | Spark SQL at $2.00/CRPU-hour; differential privacy adds $2.00/CRPU-hour; entity resolution $0.50/1,000 records matched + $100 base fee per collaboration (as-of June 2026) |
| LiveRamp | SaaS + neutral | Acquired Habu (January 2024); PAIR v1.1 compliant; EU + LatAm retail media partnerships |
| InfoSum | SaaS | Acquired by WPP/GroupM (~April 2025) — raises neutrality concerns per DigitalApplied June 2026 |
| Decentriq | SaaS | European privacy-first DCR; uses Trusted Execution Environments |
Vendor consolidation note (DigitalApplied, June 2026): LiveRamp acquired Habu (January 2024); WPP/GroupM acquired InfoSum (~April 2025). This raises a neutrality risk — a brand's measurement infrastructure being owned by a competing agency holding company.
IAB Tech Lab standards
IAB Tech Lab has issued three standards specifically for data clean room interoperability (as-of 2025):
- DCR Guidance V1.0 (July 2024) — first interoperability standard; establishes common principles, functions, privacy-enhancing technologies, limitations, and guardrails
- ADMaP v1.0 (February 2025) — Attribution Data Matching Protocol; uses Private Set Intersection (PSI) and Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs); covers identity mapping, attribution computation, and report generation
- PAIR v1.1 (July 2025) — Publisher Advertiser Identity Reconciliation; uses commutative cryptography so join keys are matched without ever decrypting to plaintext; the closest current infrastructure for cross-clean-room interoperability
- OPJA — deprecated July 2025
Privacy and regulatory context
IAB Europe Blueprint (September 2025) explicitly addresses the GDPR compliance misconception: "Use of a data clean room does not in itself ensure compliance with the GDPR — all data processing activities must still adhere to all GDPR provisions including lawfulness, purpose limitation, data minimisation, and accountability; organisations must assess on a case-by-case basis."
The same Blueprint notes that a vendor's native identity graph is NOT required; forcing use of one creates lock-in and limits interoperability. It also notes: "Not all clean rooms have the same network of publishers and DSPs; capabilities differ significantly especially between Meta and Google."
The structural driver for DCR adoption is the post-cookie privacy environment: iOS ATT (2021), GDPR/CCPA signal loss, and walled-garden measurement gaps all restrict traditional pixel- and cookie-based attribution. Google's July 2024 abandonment of third-party cookie deprecation in Chrome and subsequent wind-down of Privacy Sandbox (~October 2025) removed one expected forcing function, but DigitalApplied (June 2026) notes the durable structural drivers — iOS ATT, regulation, and walled-garden opacity — remain in force.
Adoption and market sizing
Skai 2025 State of Retail Media (n=166): 66% of organisations say they are using clean rooms in some capacity (as-of Q1 2025). Consumer electronics reaches 65% clean room usage, attributed to earlier infrastructure investment and higher media budget allocation (as-of Q1 2025).
Adoption asymmetry — buyer vs. seller: Mars United Commerce (Q2 2025) found fewer than 48% of US retail media networks offered clean-room capabilities — yet Skai (Q1 2025) finds 66% of organisations (brands/agencies) report using clean rooms. These measure different things (RMN supply-side capability vs. advertiser-side usage) and cannot be directly compared, but the gap is notable and the two figures are frequently cited without distinguishing buyer from seller adoption.
Global data clean room market: $3.2 billion in 2025; projected to reach $18.6 billion by 2034 at CAGR of 21.7% (as-of 2025, MarketIntelo).
[!unverified] MarketIntelo market sizing figures ($3.2B, $18.6B, 21.7% CAGR) — source is a market research aggregator of unknown primary sourcing. Treat as directional only; primary sourcing not verified.
Limitations and challenges
Skai (2025) identifies the top three operational challenges for organisations using clean rooms (as-of Q1 2025):
- Integrating into existing optimisation and analysis practices: 41% cite as top challenge
- Scaling as new data is added: 38%
- Lack of internal expertise: 34%
DigitalApplied (June 2026) reports an average enterprise setup cost of ~$879,000 based on a Funnel.io implementor survey (survey date unspecified; pre-June 2026). 48% of marketers not yet using a DCR cite budget as primary blocker (Skai 2025). 39% of current users struggle to extract actionable insights (Skai 2025).
IAB Europe Blueprint (September 2025): SQL/Python-based clean rooms require data science expertise; no-code/low-code options exist for simpler tasks but not for complex cross-retailer analysis.
Colin Lewis (InternetRetailing editor, quoted by Skai 2025): "The challenge of integrating data clean rooms in existing practices and joining data with other sources is the core problem."
DigitalApplied (June 2026) decision threshold (directional; vendor-informed): below $500K annual media spend, skip clean rooms; $500K–$2M, start with the free walled-garden DCR on the largest spend platform; $2M–$10M multi-publisher, evaluate Snowflake/AWS Clean Rooms or SaaS vendor; $10M+ retail media/CPG enterprise, full neutral clean room + IAB PAIR-compliant setup.
The maturity and terminology debate
"Clean room era is over" vs. "DCRs are still emerging": AdExchanger (January 7, 2026, James Hercher / Adam Solomon, LiveRamp VP) argues the term "data clean room" has been absorbed into broader industry discourse about "platform interoperability" and "data collaboration" — that the technology has become background infrastructure, like car engines to drivers. Solomon: "No brand marketer or agency buyer starts with the idea that they want a clean room. It's not the thing that you lead with." This framing contrasts with IAB Europe's September 2025 Blueprint, which positions DCRs as still requiring active adoption work, standards development, and industry education — treating them as actively emerging, not embedded background. Both agree the technology investment will continue; they disagree on whether the category as a distinct concept has peaked.
Jonathan Mendez (Neuralift AI CEO, blog post October 2025, via AdExchanger January 2026): "Data sharing is the choke point the platforms keep for the price of inventing this s**t" — arguing that the structural beneficiaries of DCR infrastructure are large platforms (Google, Amazon, Meta, Snowflake) rather than brands or independent measurement vendors.
Retail case studies
- Carrefour + LiveRamp (IAB, April 2023): DCR used to analyse consumer buying patterns (e.g. diaper purchases) without data leakage; queries siloed datasets in separate cloud environments, revealing brand switching behaviour as babies grow; progressing toward category management insights. Source is 2023 but use case description remains a valid illustrative example.
- CVS + Pinterest (eMarketer, reported by Skai 2025): ExtraCare member data linked with Pinterest audience data via clean room (as-of Q1 2025).
- Tesco + LiveRamp (July 2025): Expanded partnership across Grocery, Home & Clothing, Mobile, and retail media divisions. IAB Europe Blueprint (September 2025) also names a Tesco + BLOCK collaboration: SKU-level insights from Tesco combined with BLOCK consumer data in a "better together" clean room arrangement.
- ASICS + Habu (ANA session, September 2021): Early case study of a brand reimagining measurement strategy using a DCR after cookie deprecation disrupted legacy attribution tools.
ASICS/Habu case study (ANA, September 2021) — Habu has since been acquired by LiveRamp (January 2024); use case is illustrative of the category's early development but technical specifics are superseded.
Key terms
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Clean room | Secure environment returning aggregate outputs only; no raw user-level data transfer |
| PAIR | Publisher Advertiser Identity Reconciliation — IAB Tech Lab v1.1 (July 2025); commutative cryptography for privacy-safe audience matching |
| ADMaP | Attribution Data Matching Protocol — IAB Tech Lab v1.0 (February 2025); uses PSI and TEEs for secure attribution |
| PSI | Private Set Intersection — cryptographic technique finding dataset intersection without revealing underlying records |
| TEE | Trusted Execution Environment — hardware-isolated computing environment |
| AMC | Amazon Marketing Cloud — Amazon's walled-garden DCR; free to Sponsored Ads advertisers since September 2025 |
| Incrementality | Causal sales lift from advertising, net of baseline sales that would have occurred anyway |
| Walled garden | Platform ecosystem where first-party data is held inside the platform's own measurement infrastructure |
| Composability | Ability for a tech product to operate natively across different data warehouses or cloud systems (LiveRamp VP, AdExchanger January 2026) |
Benchmarks (as-of 2026-08-18)
| Metric | Value | Source | Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Global DCR market size | $3.2B | MarketIntelo (unknown primary sourcing) | 2025 |
| Projected market size by 2034 | $18.6B (CAGR 21.7%) | MarketIntelo | 2025 |
| Organisations using DCRs | 66% | Skai 2025 State of Retail Media (n=166) | Q1 2025 |
| US RMNs offering clean room capabilities | <48% | Mars United Commerce | Q2 2025 |
| AMC lookback window | 25 months | DigitalApplied | June 2026 |
| Google ADH minimum query cohort | 50 users | DigitalApplied | June 2026 |
| Average enterprise DCR setup cost | ~$879,000 | Funnel.io implementor survey (date unspecified) | Pre-June 2026 |
| Budget cited as primary blocker (non-users) | 48% | Skai 2025 | 2025 |
| Integration as top challenge (users) | 41% | Skai 2025 | 2025 |
| AWS Clean Rooms: Spark SQL rate | $2.00/CRPU-hour | DigitalApplied | June 2026 |
| AWS Clean Rooms: entity resolution | $0.50/1,000 records + $100/collaboration | DigitalApplied | June 2026 |