Approximately twenty years across data products, retail media, ad tech, and marketing science.
DCRI was founded by Ben Day. Ben has approximately twenty years of experience in data products, retail media, advertising technology, marketing technology, and marketing science. He most recently served as Senior Data Product Manager at Orange Apron Media, The Home Depot's retail media network, where he built data products serving brand advertisers, agencies, and retailer-side measurement teams. Prior tenure includes Microsoft and Gap Inc. He is based in Seattle.
DCRI exists because the data clean room category is repeating a familiar pattern: it's being defined by people with commercial stakes in particular outcomes — vendors selling platforms, agencies selling services, analyst firms selling subscriptions, holdcos selling capabilities. Two decades across data products, retail media, ad tech, and marketing science is enough to recognize how categories get captured by default. The category is now too important to too many practitioners to leave authority in those hands. The institute is the experiment in whether a neutral, public, practitioner-grade alternative can be built instead.
Ben writes about the institute's work on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/bendaymartech, where the build-in-public posts on the landscape and the measurement standard are published as they're drafted. The institute welcomes pushback from practitioners who operate these stacks. Pre-publication feedback shapes the published work.