“The beauty of a clean room is that it's a privacy-centric way for CVS to share data from its 74 million Extra Care members and for us to share the data from our 498 million users, and end up with a repository of powerful, completely anonymized first-party data,” said Carrie Sweeney, VP of retail at Pinterest. “Then we can connect our users with targeted ads without sharing any of their personal data, just as CVS can on its website.”

Fifty-six percent of marketers in North America said that in-depth analytics drives their data clean room strategies, according to the CMO Council. Other leading drivers included the ability to measure campaign results (54%) and ease of data integration (52%).

Privacy is the top challenge of data clean rooms, cited by nearly half of marketers and publishers worldwide who use them, per Lotame. For 41% of marketers and 37% of publishers, the tech is too expensive. Other concerns include issues with emails, scale, and partner overlap.