UK Publishers & Ocado Partner on Data Initiative
Major UK publishers including News UK, Independent, Future, and Immediate Media have formed a partnership with online retailer Ocado to advance retail media targeting strategies. This collaboration leverages Permutive’s predictive clean room technology to combine publisher audience data with Ocado’s retail purchase information, aiming to provide smarter, privacy-conscious advertising solutions.
Bridging the Data Gap with Clean Rooms
The partnership uses predictive clean rooms, a privacy-safe environment where first-party datasets from publishers and the retailer are matched without sharing personal identifiers directly. Unlike traditional deterministic clean rooms that rely on exact ID matching, predictive clean rooms use modelling and machine learning to estimate audience overlap and behaviour patterns. This method enables targeted campaigns across audiences spanning upper and lower parts of the purchase funnel.
Why This Matters Now
This collaboration addresses key challenges in the digital advertising landscape, including the deprecation of third-party cookies and increased data privacy regulations. Publishers are seeking new revenue streams as traditional ad methods face pressure, while retailers like Ocado look to deepen customer insights and monetize their data through retail media networks. The combined approach benefits advertisers by delivering more effective, privacy-safe targeting across the customer journey and offers publishers potential access to higher CPMs and richer audience insights.
The Ocado and UK publisher partnership reflects a strategic move to adapt to a changing market, using predictive clean room technology to bridge the gap between media and commerce data sources. This collaborative model exemplifies how retail media can evolve outside major walled gardens by integrating first-party data in a responsible and effective manner.
