Amazon’s clean room is … well, not open for business. But it exists!
James Hercher and Alison Weissbrot on Tuesday reported on a closed beta test run by Amazon that will give ad buyers access to more of its vaunted data.
This week on The Big Story, we’ll see what they uncovered in terms of who can use this new product, when it will be more generally available and what it currently can and cannot do.
We’ll also compare it to similar opportunities offered by big platforms like Facebook and, in particular, Google.
While Facebook has a process where ad buyers can get more access to its audience data than they ordinarily would, Google has an entire product called Ads Data Hub (ADH).
For Google, the stakes are higher since ADH is meant to replace the loss of the DoubleClick ID, an important identifier that Google has restricted in Europe due to GDPR, and will also likely restrict in the United States.
These so-called clean rooms, where ad buyers can safely access limited data sets owned by the big platforms, also serve a tactical purpose in a much bigger battle in cloud hosting. To use Ads Data Hub, clients must also pay for Google Cloud.
With Amazon’s clean room hosted on Amazon Web Services, might the ecom giant see a similar opportunity for its ad business to feed into web hosting?