TV & Streaming

Roku is the latest media company to roll out a clean room

The cookieless targeting offering is designed to attract dollars ahead of upfronts.
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Warner Brothers/HBO Max via Giphy

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As Roku pushes into original content to attract advertiser dollars during this year’s upfronts, it’s also debuting a technical offering to attract investment: a clean room.

The streaming platform’s clean room, which rolled out this week, offers advertisers and agencies the ability to compare their own aggregated data with the audience and linear-TV data that Roku collects across its devices and platforms, the company said Tuesday.

Matched data sets can then be used to determine things like potential campaign reach, current audience delivery, and advertising effectiveness to drive results like product sales and sign-ups. Several agencies are already on board: Omnicom Media Group, Dentsu, Horizon Media, Icon Media Direct, and Camelot are all using the clean room on live campaigns beginning this week.

Scrub-a-dub: Clean rooms are having a moment, as we’ve previously reported. They claim to work as a neutral intermediary where platforms and advertisers can dump their datasets to leverage each other’s data and audience insights without giving up their own first-party info, which they usually can’t—or don’t want to—share.

They’re particularly attractive as more privacy regulations and limitations crop up around the country, and as the third-party cookie continues its phaseout. But they also come with their own challenges, especially since clean rooms belonging to individual publishers can’t be compared across other platforms without using additional tools.

Get in line: Roku’s not the only entertainment company with a clean room, and it almost certainly won’t be the last. Late last year, Disney took the wraps off its own clean room, with Omnicom and Drivetime as beta launch partners.—KS

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