technology data management
Outcomes Through Collaboration: How Clean Room Technology Drives Campaign Results
Outcomes Through Collaboration: How Clean Room Technology Drives Campaign Results
A new paradigm for data collaboration is emerging one that prioritizes purpose-built applications to drive advertising outcomes. The shift to first-party data collaboration has gone from a theoretical ideal to a business-critical strategy. At Optable, we've seen this transition unfold firsthand through a transformative partnership with VIA Rail, The Globe and Mail, and Touché! (OMG), leveraging our clean room technology to deliver measurable results.
Unlocking the Value of First-Party Data
The case for collaboration has never been stronger. Advertisers like VIA Rail are looking to engage with high-value customers and glean richer insights about them. Publishers like The Globe and Mail have high-quality, engaged audiences and are increasingly investing in identity data infrastructure. When brought together in a privacy-safe environment, these assets become exponentially more impactful and enable companies to execute effective media campaigns.
Through Optable's data clean room, VIA Rail securely matched its customer segments—such as Lapsed Travelers and Mid-Week Travelers—with recent Globe readers. This collaboration enabled targeted outreach without ever exchanging raw data, safeguarding consumer privacy while boosting campaign relevance.
Expanding Reach and Optimizing Spend
To put this technology into action, the team conducted a 3-part strategy to drive & measure results.
● Tactic A used audience insights to align content and inventory.
● Tactic B expanded reach with lookalike modeling.
● Tactic C served as a control, targeting without data matching.
The results were significant. Matched segments outperformed general travel targeting, reducing cost per unique reach by 2.5 times and generating 3.4 times more reach among qualified audiences. Targeting was further refined based on content preferences—such as Personal Finance, Business Opinion and Investing—maximizing both engagement and efficiency.
Demonstrating Real-World Business Impact
Beyond targeting, measurement has long been one of the toughest challenges in digital advertising—especially without third-party cookies. With clean room technology, we enabled deterministic, privacy-safe attribution by matching ad-exposed readers with VIA Rail ticket purchasers.
This wasn’t just a win for analytics it was a business success. The campaign delivered a 20% lift in ticket sales, directly linking media investment to real-world outcomes. It also introduced smarter suppression strategies, helping the brand avoid retargeting existing customers.
Creating New Revenue Opportunities for Publishers
For The Globe and Mail, this collaboration marked more than campaign success it unlocked a new monetization model. Clean room-powered audience targeting attracted privacy-conscious advertisers, while high-intent, data-matched audiences commanded premium CPMs and supported larger campaign budgets.
The Future of Advertising is Collaborative
The VIA Rail partnership shows what's possible when advertisers, publishers, agencies, and technology platforms come together around shared goals. Clean room technology isn’t just a workaround for a cookieless future -it’s the foundation of a smarter, more collaborative, and privacy-first advertising ecosystem.
At Optable, we’re proud to help power that future one that respects privacy, delivers performance, and reimagines what data collaboration can achieve.
Vlad Stesin
Vlad’s career as a digital advertising entrepreneur spans more than two decades. Currently, he is a co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Optable, where he leads strategy and industry engagement for the identity management and data collaboration platform purpose-built for the advertising ecosystem. Previosuly, as VP of Product at AdGear and member of the Board of Directors, Vlad was responsible for strategic direction and marketing, prior to its acquisition by Samsung Electronics.
Vlad has been instrumental in the launch and commercialization of innovative products and services which address emerging customer needs, helping digital media companies achieve scale and efficiency. Prior to his role at AdGear, Vlad founded and led Randomseed, an advertising platform software company that was acquired by Cossette, where he subsequently led the digital ad technologies business unit.
At the heart of Vlad’s career lies his passion for innovation. Having been an active participant through multiple stages of evolution of digital advertising, Vlad makes it his mission to bring actionable solutions to a complex, fast-moving ecosystem.
He is Chairman of the Board of Swab The World Foundation, a non-profit organisation which aims to diversify the worldwide stem cell donor base. Vlad also serves on the Board of Directors of Hivestack, a digital-out-of-home (DOOH) advertising company, and Panoply, a media agency.
