A Fortune 10 technology company with a large digital advertising business offers its own data clean room, an environment in which advertisers and media owners can analyze combined datasets without either side exposing personal information. As third-party cookies lose their role in digital advertising, clean rooms have moved from a niche compliance tool toward core measurement infrastructure, and a growing field of walled-garden and independent providers now competes for the same budgets.
The client wanted an outside view of that market. Which use cases actually drive clean room usage today, and which are still aspirational? How widely adopted are clean rooms across agencies, brands and media companies, and how often are they used? How do practitioners rate the usability of the leading platforms, including the client's own, and what skills and data practices do they need to get value? And where do they expect the market to go on pricing, interoperability and artificial intelligence? The answers would inform product positioning and the client's roadmap.
PP&A ran the study as a series of in-depth expert interviews with practitioners who use clean rooms day to day: data and analytics leads at media agencies, marketing and measurement leaders at brands, and data and advertising sales specialists at media owners, across the United States, the United Kingdom and India. Candidates were screened for hands-on experience with at least one major clean room platform, so that ratings reflected use rather than reputation.
A structured interview guide covered five areas: the use cases each organization had deployed and their relative importance; adoption and frequency of use; the provider landscape and how walled-garden platforms compare with independent ones; ease of use, data ingestion, identity matching and the skills required; and expectations for the next few years. Each participant scored platform usability on a consistent scale so that results could be compared across providers, including the client's product.
The findings were synthesized into a final report that combined quantitative ratings with the qualitative reasoning behind them, a use-case map, a provider comparison and a forward view, together with an appendix profiling the interview base.
The client received a final report built on how practitioners use clean rooms day to day rather than on vendor positioning. It mapped which use cases drive usage and which remain aspirational, and how adoption and frequency of use differ across agencies, brands and media owners. It showed how practitioners rate the usability of the leading platforms, the client's own included. It also covered identity matching and data ingestion in practice, the skills teams need to get value, and where practitioners expect pricing, interoperability and artificial intelligence to take the market. The broad message was that people and data practices limit clean room usage as much as the technology does.
The report gave the client a set of usability, skills and interoperability themes to weigh in its roadmap and product positioning, grounded in how its own customers and its competitors' customers work.
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