OPINION: Why data clean rooms are key to unlocking creative campaigns in Australia’s travel industry

Australia’s travel industry is at the edge of a sweeping revolution, says LiveRamp managing director, Asia Pacific, Melanie Hoptman.

Travel is home to a vast wealth of rich first-party data: from flight and hotel searches, to booking trips, to add-on services like rental cars and more.

As first-party data strategies become the norm, travel marketers are well-situated to take advantage – but through data collaboration with external partners, marketers stand to generate more unified views of their customers than ever before, fostering stronger connections, driving greater engagement, and enhancing brand loyalty.

What is a data clean room?

Data clean rooms are safe and neutral spaces for data collaboration and partnerships to exist without either party – or parties – having access to the other’s customer data. Data clean rooms have become essential tools for data collaboration, and are now offered as part of data collaboration platforms, as well as from cloud companies and more. The steady spread of tools like commerce and retail media networks is underpinned by data clean rooms, which help to unlock data collaboration between media networks and marketers leveraging them for better performance.

By now, travel marketers should be well across the transition to first-party data. As marketers develop their first-party data strategies, they’ll start to learn more about their customers, including critical insights like customer preferences, demographics, behaviour patterns, and market trends. As marketers take inventory of their first-party data, they can start to identify areas where data collaboration can drive the best returns and prioritise which of their partners to start collaborating with.

As an immediate benefit, taking stock of first-party data can drive better reach, targeting, and measurement. Understanding your customers and their journeys can help identify new, untapped audiences and the most effective channels and tactics to reach fresh prospects. Similarly, segmenting these audiences based on demographic, behavioural, and other insights can help to create more targeted campaigns and personalised content, driving better results. Finally, a person-based view, informed by first-party data, can help you understand how often customers are seeing your campaigns, and whether these views are driving performance.

Getting data collaboration off the ground

As companies make the transition from mature first-party data strategies to fluent data collaborators, they’ll be able to gain even more customer insights and performance, including:

• Enhanced segment activation and lookalike modelling: Sharing insights with data collaborators can help companies to tap into wider, more qualified audiences – understanding what your ideal customer looks like can help you build lookalike models, then expand your audiences on other platforms.
• Time to conversion: Collaborating across the different stages of your customers’ journeys – including with publishers, or with retailers and other places that your customers convert – can help to better quantify the time between ad exposure and conversion.
• Co-marketing: Collaborating with partners can boost joint campaigns, as well as measure the effectiveness of this cross-promotion without exposing customer-level data. For complementary products and services, like airlines and hotels, this can help to uncover how much overlap their customer bases have.

Moving forward

Data clean rooms provide secure environments for sharing insights without compromising customer privacy. By collaborating first-party data with external insights, clean rooms help to create a richer, more comprehensive customer view while ensuring privacy compliance.

As Australia’s travel marketing industry evolves, clean rooms will become essential for maintaining competitive advantages, fostering customer trust, and driving long-term business growth.