Walgreens-owned Boots sets out vision for data clean rooms

By Seb Joseph

Marketers at the Walgreens-owned retail pharmacy chain Boots are settling down for a long, hard test to get the most from a data clean room strategy — but to do so, they first had to reset their expectations of data management.

Whenever marketers update their approach, or their perspective, it’s vital they return to basic principles, said the retailer’s chief marketing officer Peter Markey. Strip everything back, he continued.

So: what is a data clean room today, and what should it deliver for marketers?

This is where things get hazy. There’s a smorgasbord of data clean rooms, and knowing which one does what, how they store data and manage the flow of it between different systems and even different data clean rooms needs addressing. Unsurprisingly, Markey turned to his colleagues at the data sciences division of Boots to help make sense of it all.

Together, they decided that Markey needed the clean room to have a specific function that provided a secure, privacy-complaint way to see how his customers overlapped with a given publisher’s audience. That meant a solution that wasn’t owned by one single media owner. This way they wouldn’t be limited to only accessing user-level data from a particular media owner in an environment that’s owned by them.

What Markey wanted was a safe space where two companies could come together with their first-party data in a way that mitigates any concern that their data will get leaked to the other party. Another easier said than done part of Boots’ search for a data clean room. Not least because it’s relatively straightforward to create connections between different data sets. The tricky part is doing so without exposing that information.

“We needed a partner that was going to offer us strong matchable data and quick integrations through collaborations with media owners — all while being happy that the data on both sides was going to remain secure,” said Markey.

Markey thought: this is going to be a longer arduous process. Later it occurred to him that maybe that was the whole point.

“The starting point for this whole process was how we can use our first-party data to drive what we call ‘mass personalization’ for our customers in environments that they enjoy being in,” said Markey.

What that actually means — at least for now — is being able to target members of the Boots Advantage loyalty card scheme with specific messaging while they’re watching their favorite soap opera on a streaming service owned by one of the mainstream TV networks like ITV or Channel 4 in the U.K. “This hyper targeting may be expensive, but in many ways it’s worth it if it delivers that extra reach,” said Markey. “In many ways, it offsets some of the wastage that’s inherently built into broadcast advertising.”

Eventually, Boots settled on the data clean room from InfoSum. Not only did it offer the necessary assurances around how the data would and wouldn’t be managed, it also had the backing of some of the …read more

Source:: Digiday