Let’s draw inspiration from cookies. That’s a sentence you don’t hear people in tech say very often, at a time when so many are busy trying to create order from cookieless chaos. Aren’t we supposed to be leaving those bad old ways behind?

Yes, third-party cookies have a lot of problems not worth listing here. But let’s not pretend they had no good qualities. In fact, they facilitated a revolutionary, frictionless collaboration between publishers, advertisers and ad tech vendors. All you needed to do to work together was to slap on a cookie matching tag, and voila - you were collaborators. 

And then, of course, it all went too far. When you took unrestricted cookies to their logical conclusion, what you got was a wild west populated by thousands of vendors, all creating intricate and ingenious ways of slicing and dicing audiences and reselling data. The eventual consequence was what we are seeing now: third-party cookies and other public identifiers, having taken a great idea far past the point of good sense, are being wound up and put away in disgrace. 

But still, the frictionless-ness of cookie matching is well worth taking inspiration from - because out of an absence of friction come virtues including openness, interoperability and ease of use. These are the characteristics that the next generation of data collaboration technologies need to retain if they are to become a viable, improved replacement for those building blocks of yesteryear.

Data clean rooms are one such example. On the one hand, their transparency and privacy are the antithesis of what cookies became. By using modern, secure cryptographic techniques, you allow the matching of data without ever allowing it to leave the private instance of the platform on which it is shared, whether that is operated by a brand, a publisher or some other data partner.

But on the other hand, we also need openness, interoperability and ease of use in the cookieless world, and those are all part of the essence of the solution data clean rooms provide. Here's why:

Ease of use. It has to be easy to set up a collaboration with a partner. It’s insane to imagine that anyone you want to work with should have to be a client of the vendor you use before you can do anything together. For a data clean room to be convenient and viable, any customer needs to be able to collaborate with any non-customer within one. No fuss, no obligations. If it isn’t easy to do, no-one will do it.

Interoperability. Data is scattered all over the place. Interoperability with the systems of others is important. The fact is, the whole world won’t be using the same database, no matter how great it is, so the objective of the data collaboration vendor is to make it as easy as possible to work with data from any source: from a martech platform, a database, Amazon Web Services logs, or a customer data platform. Interoperability might be complex, but it should also be a basic requirement.

Openness. This needs to go in all directions, and it applies to clean room vendors as much as it applies to brands, publishers and data collaborators. If their customers are to benefit, all clean room vendors must work to implement interoperability with each other. In our case, we are practising what we preach: Optable has published an open-source library that allows anyone to implement the same open cryptographic protocol.

Privacy, security and trust must be the watchwords of data collaboration from now on. But just because data clean rooms are secure, decentralized and designed to work without third-party cookies, does not mean they should not borrow the best qualities cookies once brought to the market.

In fact, only by doing so will they emerge as the best data collaboration solution for a cookieless world.

Also published in: MarTech Outlook

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