Clean rooms are expensive and rigid. Data collaboration policies offer the same privacy and governance benefits—without the complexity.
The Promise (and Problem) of Clean Rooms
Over the last few years, data clean rooms have become one of the most talked-about solutions in advertising and marketing technology. They promised a secure environment for companies to share and analyze data without exposing raw, sensitive information.
But while clean rooms solved one problem, they created others.
Standing up a clean room requires significant investment—time, technical resources, and money. Worse, the resulting setup is often rigid and slow-moving. Use cases are hard-coded. Integrations take months. And agility? Practically nonexistent.
For companies that need to collaborate across multiple partners, environments, and timelines, clean rooms are overkill.
What Companies Really Need
Companies don’t want another monolithic system. They want to collaborate—with purpose and control.
That means being able to:
- Share identity-resolved datasets without revealing PII
- Define exactly how data can be used (and how it can’t)
- Set guardrails based on partner, purpose, and time
- Collaborate with multiple partners without duplicating effort or infrastructure
In other words, they want clean room-style governance, without the clean room itself.
Composable Identity + Collaboration Policies = A Better Path
Narrative offers a fundamentally different approach.
By combining Composable Identity with data collaboration policies, brands and publishers can work together in real time—with governance built in.
Collaboration policies function like smart contracts for data. They define, enforce, and track:
- Who can access a dataset
- What they can do with it (e.g., activate, analyze, enrich)
- For how long
- Under what conditions
And because they’re composable, these policies can be configured and reused across use cases, without starting from scratch every time.
What This Looks Like in Practice
Imagine a major retailer with a fast-growing retail media network.
They want to let CPG partners reach identity-resolved audiences on their owned channels. But they don’t want that data used for enrichment—or exported into a partner’s own systems.
With a clean room, this would mean complex integration work, setting up shared infrastructure, and creating custom rules for every partner.
With Narrative, the retailer simply attaches a collaboration policy to the dataset. It says:
- This partner can activate audiences via specific DSPs
- They cannot access or download the data
- The policy expires in 90 days
- All usage is logged and auditable
No clean room. No delays. No headaches.
Why This Matters Now
As privacy regulation tightens and identity becomes more fragmented, data governance can’t be an afterthought. But it also can’t be a blocker.
Clean rooms often require trade-offs between control and speed. With collaboration policies, you get both.
- Faster time-to-value
- Fine-grained governance
- Lower cost and complexity
- Seamless integration with your current stack
The Bottom Line
You don’t need to buy or build a clean room to collaborate securely.
With Narrative, you can use Composable Identity and data collaboration policies to unlock the benefits of clean rooms—without the baggage.
Ready to see how it works? Book a demo today.