How clean rooms help secure data sharing and cloud data warehouse enrichment

Brands today need to optimize first-party data more than ever before. With Lytics, brands can leverage massive amounts of data while still meeting regulatory privacy mandates.

Designing a privacy-first model is essential. It’s also what Lytics delivers every day to customers across industries. The key to maximizing the value of first-party data is the Lytics customer data platform (CDP), which works closely with Google cloud services to optimize data while maintaining privacy. We recently partnered with Google Cloud to host a webinar detailing why and how it works.

Here’s an overview of some of the insights we explored alongside Dr. Ali Arsanjani, Director, Cloud Partner Engineering for Google Cloud.

There’s a need for customer- and privacy-centric tools for marketers

Optimizing first-party data means leveraging the technologies in both CDPs and cloud data warehouses. Together, these technologies allow marketers to:

• Connect data and identities
• Build and store unified profiles
• Segment and discover audiences
• Activate data to the ecosystem

However, regulatory shifts in what data can and should be collected and how it should be stored and used demand privacy by design. Companies need to carefully design and use technologies that adhere to regulatory mandates that are growing daily. As the use of third-party data wanes, marketers will need to maximize technologies like clean rooms, which allow for the connecting and stitching of data while not sharing data itself.

Why a strategic alignment with Google?

Lytics aligns its CDM and other solutions with Google Cloud to create a single, unified data system for our customers. The model allows customers to leverage both technologies to their utmost advantage. Among the benefits of the Lytics and Google integration are:

• Integrated BigQuery. Lytics automates a daily export of all events and profiles to a customer’s BigQuery. This process syncs all tables in the customer’s BigQuery instance
• Profile Enrichment. Lytics connects directly to customer BigQuery tables to create and execute new queries and add new SQL-based attributes to profiles
• Ad Integrations. The Lytics CDP allows real-time activation, triggers and lookalike modeling across all campaigns and Google channels
• Data Sharing. The Lytics clean room solution leverages the integrated BigQuery warehouse and Analytics Hub to help customers share data securely with partners
• Security and Privacy. The Lytics CDP is designed to deploy flexibly, across Google Cloud regions, to give customers enhanced control, security and compliance with privacy and data residency regulations.

Ensuring privacy via technology intersections

In our webinar, we explored the idea of privacy by design. Leaders from both Lytics and Google Cloud discussed the intersection of these technologies and the privacy protections they provide.

“Our desire is to help organizations get more value from the investments that they’re making in Google,” said Jeff Seacrist, SVP of Product and Product Marketing. “We think that opens up a lot of possibilities for customers to optimize their first-party data in ways that respect the changes in the privacy landscape.”

He also noted that it’s critical that the Lytics partnership with Google retains flexibility for customers. By using Lytics CDP as the hub around which brands manage and leverage data, they are future-proofing against inevitable changes in the regulatory space that will emerge later.

One of the biggest challenges brands face is designing the architecture. The right infrastructure allows you to adjust to the regulatory changes that will come down the road regarding data usage and storage. A smart infrastructure plan means brands won’t have to tear everything out and start over. Butnot all customers know where to begin when it comes to regulations and compliance, and they often run into common pitfalls related to moving data and dealing with PII and PHI restrictions.

“There’s one end of the spectrum [where] you have monolithic CDPs where everything is embedded in it as a black box. That may or may not be the product of choice. There may be multiple different capabilities for multiple different partners you’re working with. By contrast, deconstructed or composable CDPs, like Lytics, have BigQuery in their center of gravity — and in a constellation around it are all these different capabilities you need for segmentation, stitching, personalization, anonymization and entity resolution,” explains Dr. Arsanjani.

All these elements are critical for marketing and can become options that customers choose from, providing a customized solution that maintains and reinforced privacy.

The synergy of your data warehouse and CDP

From a privacy perspective, the data warehouse and CDP are closely related. The data warehouse is the center of your data solution. Around it, the tech industry is building capabilities that enable activation around each marketing stage. Because at the end of the day, what brands desire is a 360-degree view of their customers. They want to understand customers from an amalgamation of all the different data sources in play. And they may or may not want to share data with partners. That’s the core concept notion behind a clean room. It allows for partners to access and act on the data, such as joining or segmenting information, while protecting it.

Building a data warehouse requires the inclusion of connectors. ETLs and reverse ETLs, which extract, transform and load data to and from the warehouse, are critical functionality. But the strength of these solutions is in the connection between the data warehouse and the clean room technology. Each is powerful on its own, but stronger when combined and leveraging the best capabilities of each element.

The result? A stronger brand identity, understanding the available data, and knowing how the technologies together can reinforce what the brand is. These technologies need not replace existing processes, but instead augment and improve them over time. Plus, control is retained to help data be shared, siphoned and used optimally.

“That’s why BigQuery needs to be the heart. Because it enables collaboration that quite frankly no CDP can do on its own,” shares Mark Hayden, VP of Product at Lytics. “If you’re a brand just trying to share either all of your data or a subset of data, even with independent brands under your own umbrella, that can be challenging and have its own restrictions. Lytics understands how all those unique identifiers are developed, which further enhances BigQuery’s capabilities and makes the Lytics CDP more powerful.”

He also noted that access control is one of the strongest capabilities of the Lytics CDP. This fine level of control is essential for brands that, today, have to share data to be effective, but need to do so in a secure, compliant way. This access control eliminates the need to copy data and allows you to share data with partners and consumers in a collaborative way.

Here’s how it works with Lytics

Most marketers today struggle with data coming from multiple sources. Information includes batched data in a CRM, core systems, point-of-sale and analytics. Streamed data comes via email, websites and ads.

Using Lytics Conductor, brands can build complex, detailed profiles from those myriad data sources.Those profiles are then loaded into BigQuery and, using Analytics Hub as the clean room solution, brands can create sophisticated queries to generate lists or draw insights.

Lytics Cloud Connect can then take that customer data and create specific segments for use in various marketing initiatives.Those segments can then be used in multiple ways to create more effective campaigns, including:

• Email marketing
• Ad networks on social media platforms
• CRMs for additional outreach and customization

The end result is that brands can use highly leveraged data to build better and more accurate profiles. They can activate that data to build smarter queries in the clean room and launch more effective and more profitable campaigns. The solution also ensures compliance. Data stays where it is and is only used within the Google Cloud environment. There’s no jumping around and moving and copying data, ensuring accuracy and minimizing risk. Plus, Lytics has hundreds of connectors to various tools that allow for simple integration with whatever tools you use to deploy marketing campaigns.

A CDP may be your key to (finally) knocking down data silos

CDPs often tried to tackle the challenges of data silos by creating, ironically, a massive data silo. Lytics, with its data warehouse, takes a wholly different approach.

• By making the querying function the core element of data sharing, old, insecure and increasingly noncompliant processes are eliminated. For example, emailing data lists from one party to another is unnecessary and the risks of doing so are eradicated.
• The privacy and flexibility functionality of Google’s Analytics Hub has multiple use cases for organizations. Data can be shared collaboratively either externally or internally. For example, one apparel retailer partnering with another retailer can use Lytics to co-market among teams without sharing any customer lists.
• Internal coordination is one of the most high-value use cases. While a brand might own its data, regional and sub-brand differences may add to the complexity of data sharing. Stitching together data can be increasingly challenging in such cases.
• Suppression is one technique that allows marketers to fine-tune exactly where they are investing marketing dollars to target high-value or high-potential customers of a partner more directly.

These are only some of the scenarios where Lytics becomes even more valuable. Lytics allows for profiles to be unified, with different identifies matched and connected in actionable ways. This connecting of profiles in Lytics creates even more opportunities — including using BI and other tools to gain additional insights about customers. They can also foster transparency internally, enabling users throughout the organization to have a single source of truth for data in various places and formats.

Lytics is a powerful, Google-preferred CDP that allows marketers to get more from the data they have. To learn more about how Lytics clean room solution and Google can help you leverage your data to its fullest, watch the full webinar.