Google is rolling out its clean room collaboration, which will be key to opening new data pathways in the ad tech ecosystem as programmatic advertisers prepare for a post-cookie internet. Google has slowly been opening up to more clean room providers, including InfoSum, Habu and LiveRamp, which have services for publishers and advertisers that transact in online ads through Google’s Display and Video 360 demand side platform. And last week, Google made a core data product—called PAIR—widely available through those partners.

PAIR stands for “Publisher Advertiser Identity Reconciliation” and it’s a new way for marketers and publishers to match audiences for targeted ads while securing customer data in the clean room tech from Habu, InfoSum and LiveRamp. Google has its own clean room known as Google Ads Data Hub, which marketers and publishers also use to reconcile data sets for targeting and measuring ads online.  Since October, Google has been making clean room functions available to more third parties that have adopted PAIR, and now the clean room partners all said the tool is generally available. Google’s work with clean rooms has been viewed as a step toward more openness in its tightly controlled ad platform, giving publishers and marketers more flexibility to work with their own data sets and marketing partners.

Also read: A guide to data clean rooms

“What they [Google] were looking to build with their protocol was being able to operate this outside of Ads Data Hub,” said Valerie Mercurio, VP of business development at InfoSum, the data collaboration platform. “It will be a much more neutral playing field for teams that have already adopted clean room technology.”

Clean rooms have become all the rage in online advertising as the industry develops ways to share data without disclosing customer information, or leaking that information into internet ad auctions where it can’t be protected. Also, with the deprecation of cookies in web browsers, which Apple already retired and soon Google will follow, major marketers are looking for new ways to collect their own data and use it for advertising. Brands are building first-party data sets, rather than relying on third-party cookies, to conduct targeted ad campaigns. The clean rooms are places where publishers—the sellers of ad space—and the brands can sync up audience data. Google’s PAIR was developed as one type of identity solution that could be used by advertisers using Display and Video 360.

“Google is keeping ahead of the death of third-party cookies,” Mercurio said.

PAIR is for publishers and advertisers "to provide personalized experiences to the customers they each have a trusted first-party relationship with,” according to Dan Taylor, VP of Global Ads at Google.

“Publishers can use any SSP [supply-side platform] or ad server, and PAIR can be used across all types of inventory and deal types, such as open auction and private marketplace,” Taylor said in an email to Ad Age. “We also recently announced integrations with several clean rooms to enable customer choice and help scale the workflow, data management and encryption processes for PAIR, so advertisers and publishers don’t have to do this on their own.”

“Ads Data Hub for Marketers also plans to integrate with PAIR, and based on partner feedback, we will consider adding more clean room integrations in the future,” Taylor said.

The work Google is doing with products such as PAIR is separate from the work that Google’s Chrome team is doing to prepare to sunset third-party cookies in the browser in 2024. That work is being done through a separate track called Privacy Sandbox.

Google is competing with other major cloud and data providers to offer clean room services. Microsoft and Amazon have both made strides to incorporate marketing clouds into their ad tech ecosystems, and they work with many of the same clean room partners. The entire industry is still developing protocols and standards through working with trade groups such as IAB, so that brands and publishers can come up with secure ways to put consumer data to use.

Read more about the Privacy Sandbox here

Brands want to be able to take the first-party data they collect and store it in one clean room to match it with publishers’ data, which may be operating in entirely different clean room environments. The keys for both sides of the ad industry are to keep control of their proprietary customer data but also achieve scale in ad campaigns.

“It’s all encrypted data,” said Mike Moreau, co-founder and chief operating officer at Habu, a clean room software firm. “The encryption keys are different for the publisher versus the advertiser and there is really no way to get around that.”

So far, more media companies have adopted PAIR as a protocol than brands, Moreau said. The next wave of adoption has to come from the advertisers that are looking to match their first-party data to target ad impressions.

Many brands are still waiting for it to come down to the wire with the loss of third-party cookies before experimenting with alternative identifiers, according to ad experts. There are concerns that reliance on strictly first-party data could limit the availability of ad impressions on the open web.

“The goal is definitely a little bit more interoperability across the ecosystem,” Mercurio said. Right now, Google’s PAIR works within each clean room provider’s domain, preventing, say, a publisher on Habu from syncing customers with an advertiser that uses InfoSum. The hope is that data clean rooms can achieve more cross-connections.

Travis Clinger, head of addressability and activations at LiveRamp, the data collaboration platform, said that LiveRamp has been testing Google’s PAIR since May. LiveRamp has about 14,000 publishers and plans to onboard at least 100 of them into PAIR by the end of the summer. It enables “cookieless” advertising, Clinger said.

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CORRECTION: PAIR stands for Publisher Advertiser Identity Reconciliation.