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Flagship publication · Currently in draft

The Marketing Data Clean Room Landscape 2026: A Practitioner's Map

The institute's flagship publication. A vendor-neutral architecture taxonomy, in-depth profiles of twelve consequential platforms, and a buyer's decision framework — for the marketing-side teams who actually have to choose between architectures.

Scope of v1

Advertising and marketing clean rooms. Adjacent verticals are out of scope for v1 and will be considered in future versions.

Format

Web-first living document, downloadable PDF companion, updated quarterly.

What it covers.

A vendor-neutral architecture taxonomy that organizes the market into three architectures — warehouse-native, walled-garden, and neutral specialist — with the identity layer rendered as a horizontal spine that all three consume.

In-depth profiles of twelve consequential platforms covering ownership, neutrality posture, pricing, identity strategy, interoperability posture, evidence base, and the strategic risks each buyer should plan for. A retail media cluster profile covering the five largest RMNs as a side-by-side rather than five separate profiles.

A buyer's decision framework that takes the buyer's use case, identity stack, cloud posture, regulatory exposure, in-house technical capacity, budget, and lock-in posture and produces a tier recommendation, two to three vendor candidates to evaluate, the risks to plan for, and a reference question set for RFP conversations.

A watch list of additional players and standards developments worth tracking.

What it does not cover.

Adjacent verticals are out of scope for v1 and will be considered in future versions. Brand-lift and awareness measurement are out of scope. Third-party-cookie-based open-web measurement is deprecated and out of scope by design.

Format.

Web-first living document with a downloadable PDF companion, updated on a quarterly cadence. Material changes between updates — ownership, neutrality posture, pricing, regulatory action, documented inaccuracy — trigger an interim revision logged on the relevant profile.

How to participate.

If you operate one of these stacks and want to push back on the architecture taxonomy, the vendor profiles, or the decision framework before publication, reach the institute at info@dcrinstitute.org. Pre-publication feedback shapes the published version.