It must be hot in the data bunker, because Brian Lesser, CEO of InfoSum, said he was “sweating through this conversation”—a panel titled “Moving Beyond the Hype: How Data Clean Rooms are Powering Media Today”—at Advertising Week New York on Monday.

It was just the temperature in the room, though (which seemed to be overheated). Fellow panelist Joanna O’Connell, an independent research analyst, agreed, lamenting, “I’m wearing a pleather dress.”

InfoSum is the data clean room company known for popularizing the term “data bunker,” which is a secure computing environment for brands to store data. Lesser was speaking to an audience that is worried about programmatic advertising after the death of cookies and ad IDs on mobile devices. Data clean rooms could fill the void, but it’s going to take some cooperation from major platforms like Meta, Lesser said.

Related: Post-cookie ad tech glossary: "clean room" and more terms  

He pointed to Google as a recent surprising champion of industry cooperation. Last week, Google launched PAIR, short for publisher advertiser identity reconciliation, which gives brands and publishers flexibility to access data. “If I said to you two years ago, Google is going to open up a mechanism by which its advertisers can get data in and out of DV360, through different technology that’s not built by Google, you’d say, like, ‘No, never happen,’” Lesser said. 

“Frankly, I think other walled gardens are going to come along,” Lesser said. “I think that Meta will do the same thing, probably not exactly the way Google does it, but I think they’re under a lot of pressure to figure out, ‘OK, well how do we do this.’ Amazon apparently has their own clean room solution.”

Data clean rooms have become a hot industry topic, as publishers such as Disney and NBCUniversal make them a part of their ad offerings. The idea is the media platforms run computing environments where they match data on viewers, and site visitors, with data from brands, in order to target and measure ads. InfoSum’s pitch is that it facilitates this matching without co-mingling data, so neither side ever sees the other’s cards.

However, the ad industry is still trying to come up with standards around how data clean rooms operate and protocols about how data is used. For instance, Meta and Google were major participants at a recent IAB Tech Lab privacy summit, where Meta execs expressed some skepticism about the hodge-podge nature of data clean room standards. It’s a dynamic that Lesser commented on during the talk at Advertising Week.

“Can you tell me how you guys think about what constitutes a clean room, because there’s a lot of noise out there,” O’Connell asked.

“I love the world of ad tech, but one of the things I don’t like about it, is that we tend to gravitate toward these definitions,” Lesser said. “And then everybody kind of jumps in and says, like, 'oh it’s a clean room. I’m a clean room. He’s a clean room. She’s a clean room,' before we really know the term.”