Ad Alliance relies on data security in the Data Clean Room with Azure confidential computing

The challenge: Analyze large amounts of data in compliance with data protection regulations

It is Saturday evening, you are watching your favorite show on TV—and then you see an ad for a sweater that is a perfect addition to your closet. The same ad comes up again while you are surfing the internet. That is no coincidence: it's because companies want to place their advertising precisely where it will reach the target group. Consumers, in turn, only want to see content that is relevant to them. To make this kind of target-group-specific approach work, advertisers need a lot of information, for example, about media usage or interests of consumers. And that is where Ad Alliance, one of the largest marketing companies in Germany, comes in: the company provides its customers, the advertisers, with customized placement solutions across all media.

As part of the RTL Germany media group and under the umbrella of Bertelsmann, Ad Alliance has a large number of data points to draw on and subsequently analyze. However, the advertising market is constantly facing new challenges in the form of restrictive data protection regulations. “The end of third-party cookies has had a major impact on how we work. There is less and less data available to us,” explains Sandy Ukat, Lead Data Solutions at Ad Alliance. “The big question was: ‘What other data can we use to help our customers deliver their ads to specific target groups?’ And it did not take us long to figure out that first-party data was the way forward.” First-party data is data owned by companies: things like surfing behavior, movement behavior, streaming behavior, particular interests of target groups, and consumption of households.

However, working with this data calls for the right technological infrastructure. “User-friendliness, transparency, and data protection are always at the heart of our work. That is why we wanted a solution that could analyze huge amounts of complex data and guarantee data security at the same time,” Ukat says. The solution that best met this requirement was the Data Clean Room from Decentriq, which is based on Microsoft Azure confidential computing.

The solution: Secure data collaboration thanks to the Data Clean Room on the Azure cloud platform

The Data Clean Room by Decentriq offers Ad Alliance and its advertising partners a space for collaboration guaranteed to comply with data-protection guidelines. It is built on the basis of Azure confidential computing. The service secures the technology, isolates the environment, and thus protects the data. “The Data Clean Room overcomes three major challenges: When working with the data, it guarantees the security of that data at all times and enables compliance with data protection. This helps us to dispel concerns of companies about using their customer data in a collaboration,” explains Maximilian Groth, Co-Founder and CEO of Decentriq. The modular architecture and the high level of control over access and functions also allow Ad Alliance to react flexibly to changes in data protection and legislation, while at the same time ensuring the solution’s future viability.

The way in which the data is processed also plays a role: the Data Clean Room receives only encrypted data from the databases of Ad Alliance and its partners, and all this data on demographics, purchase histories, online behavior, and much more is compared and analyzed in order to identify common target groups. This gives Ad Alliance insights into which campaigns were particularly relevant for which customer segments, or which products are especially popular. Based on these findings, Ad Alliance can now offer its customers an even more targeted customer approach without sharing personal identifiers of consumers—meaning that the ad for the perfect sweater still reaches precisely the right target group.

However, the Data Clean Room does more than just enable collaboration between first-party data of Ad Alliance and that of its customers. “It also lets us work on our anonymized data together with other advertisers, partners, media agencies, or retailers and makes collaborating with them quick and easy,” Ukat says. “These collaborations give us insights into new data and in-depth knowledge about different user groups. At the same time, it increases quality by enabling us to evaluate the data consistently and in an integrated manner across the various sources. This expanded use of data means we can offer our customers even more precise advertising solutions.”

The new solution is also easy to access, which means employees can quickly familiarize themselves with it. No wonder, then, that the Data Clean Room is already an integral part of everyday working life for Ad Alliance—and for its partners. “The artificial intelligence in the Decentriq Data Clean Room does most of the preparatory work and processes the large amounts of data extremely efficiently, so employees can devote their full attention to processes that add value,” Ukat says. “And because this also accelerates our work processes, we can keep up with the fast-moving media world, remain competitive, and continue to grow. With its flexibility and scalability, Azure is the perfect basis for this.”

Ukat sums up by saying: “This new solution ensures that data collaboration still takes place within the technological and data-protection framework that we as Ad Alliance have set up for this issue.” And the company is set to take this further in the future, because the Data Clean Room was just the beginning: Ad Alliance wants to further exploit the potential of first-party data, integrate new media environments, data partners, and databases, and examine the use of AI for additional analyses to make sure advertising continues to comply with data protection regulations and arrive precisely where it needs to.