Retail media has entered a more complex and mature phase. What began as an effort to monetize owned and operated inventory has become a broader strategy focused on turning commerce data into a scalable media asset. To execute this, retail media networks must connect data across a growing number of environments, working with brands, agencies, and platforms that do not share infrastructure or systems. This requires secure, structured data collaboration.
Clean rooms and Data Collaboration Platforms have become the central mechanism for enabling that collaboration. As demand has grown, so has reliance on clean room infrastructure. But the clean room market itself has changed.
Originally, clean rooms were positioned as neutral tools designed to support collaboration between entities that lacked shared systems and needed a safe way to work together, and many of them were. Over time, many clean room providers found it difficult to survive as point solutions and were acquired and folded into broader strategic platforms. Today, the most recognizable clean room offerings are no longer standalone products. They operate within the structure of larger businesses: identity and onboarding companies, cloud providers, publishers, or agency holding companies.
This wave of consolidation has altered both the economics and the incentives surrounding data collaboration. Retailers now face a growing dependence on clean rooms at the very moment that truly neutral infrastructure has become harder to find. What remains is a fragmented set of solutions, each aligned with a different commercial interest.
This creates significant friction for RMNs. To operate at scale, they need infrastructure that supports choice, avoids lock-in, and maintains independence from competing incentives. In practice, RMNs need a collaboration infrastructure that can work at any agency or publisher, interoperate in any cloud environment, and not force them into using any specific identity spine. Neutrality is the new imperative.
Identity Agnostic: Clean rooms that are coupled with a proprietary identity graph often require participants to use that identity framework as a condition of participation. This limits interoperability, increases cost, and creates strategic dependency. Retailers may be required to license an identity spine they did not choose, or to align with a framework that does not match their audience or platform strategy. A clean room should support multiple forms of identity, including the ability to bring your own identifiers, and it should avoid privileging a single identity product as the default.
Cloud Agnostic:
Most large-scale retailers operate across multiple cloud environments. Their technology stacks are often built to accommodate legacy systems, international compliance requirements, and vendor-specific relationships. Clean rooms that are embedded in a single cloud provider’s infrastructure can restrict participation and increase complexity for partners operating elsewhere. A clean room must be able to analyze and activate data from any cloud environment without requiring costly migrations or limiting who can participate.
Commercial Neutrality:
When a clean room is owned or operated by a media buyer, agency network, or publisher, it introduces unavoidable questions about data use and competitive access. These structures create real or perceived conflicts of interest that can erode trust in the collaboration process. For retailers working with multiple brands and advertisers, the clean room must serve as a neutral environment. Its function should be infrastructure, not influence.
These attributes are not preferences. They reflect the operational reality of building open, performant retail media networks in an increasingly fragmented data and media environment.
A New Home
The structural question now facing retail media leaders is where clean rooms should live. Clean rooms couldn’t sustain themselves commercially as standalone products, but the embedded model introduces trade-offs in neutrality, access, and control that undermine their real purpose.
Clean rooms need a home that preserves their neutrality rather than compromising it through embedded commercial interests. Infrastructure designed for independence, such as measurement systems that are interoperable, identity-agnostic, and media-neutral, offers a compelling model. While not the only path forward, it reflects the kind of trusted, flexible foundation that retail media networks need to scale collaboration with confidence.
Retail media’s next chapter depends on this. Commerce data is an increasingly valuable asset, but it cannot be activated at scale unless trust, access, and flexibility are built into the systems that manage it. Clean rooms are foundational to that system, but they should be embedded within business models that support, rather than compromise, their value proposition.
The author, Edik Mitelman, is SVP and General Manager, Privacy Cloud, at AppsFlyer.