Activation Clean Rooms

Exchanging information on overlapping audiences with partners

What are Activation Clean Rooms?

Activation clean rooms enable two partners to match in order to activate the resulting overlapping audience on the receiver’s side. This allows advertisers and publishers to work together on data-driven advertising campaigns and targeting strategies while maintaining a high level of data privacy and security.

Secure Matching

Secure matching is a foundational capability of the Optable Data Collaboration Node (DCN). It allows partners to connect their DCNs and exchange information on their audiences and private identity graphs in a secure, controlled, and configurable manner. Secure matching is the foundation of first-party data collaboration in the privacy age of online advertising.

Directional Audience Matching

The universal secure match operation supported by all Optable DCNs by default is the directional audience match. It is a direct match involving at least two partners. In a directional audience match, there is a sender and a receiver, with the sender initiating the operation with a specified source audience. The receiver uses all matchable IDs previously loaded into the DCN to perform the match.

Receiving Matches

All incoming matches are displayed in the Clean Rooms > Activations section of your DCN UI. For each incoming match, you will see a list of match attempts, with the status and results of each attempt. The results display the number of each type of matchable ID found in your DCN that were also present in the sender's source audience.

Additionally, you will find a link from the incoming match description to an automatically created matched audience. The matched audience is assembled from the list of matching identifiers from each successfully completed attempt, and includes all identity clusters to which the matching identifiers belong. Each new and successful attempt updates the active version of the matched audience.

It is important to note that no new IDs are learned by the receiver as a result of a secure match. The result of a secure match is that the receiver learns only the overlapping IDs, which are the existing IDs that the receiver already knows and that are also present in the sender's source audience. Furthermore, no information regarding IDs that are not part of the match is transferred.

The results associated with each received match are made available to both partners. However, the sending partner will only learn the privacy protected values as described in the differential privacy section section.

Sending Matches

Any type of audience can be used to send a secure directional match. To send a match from your Optable DCN, click on the Create Match button from the Collaborate > Clean Rooms > Activations section of the UI and follow the configuration steps.

You can match a single source audience with multiple receiving partners, a separate match will be created for each. You can also configure the match to run at a future time and date or to refresh daily until a specified end date. Refreshing matches will initiate new attempts with the latest available DCN data.

For long duration campaigns (e.g., 1 month or more), it is recommended to refresh matches based on the frequency with which your underlying audience data changes. For example, if you expect underlying audience data to change weekly, a weekly refresh is recommended.

If you are not an Optable DCN customer, you can still send secure matches to DCNs by launching an Optable Flash Node, an AWS Connector or Snowflake Connector when being invited by an existing Optable customer.