AdExchanger's framing suggests clean rooms are being subsumed rather than abandoned — folded into broader retail media, identity, and measurement stacks now that the novelty of privacy-safe matching has worn off. That's consistent with what buyers of this infrastructure have grumbled about for two years: too many walled implementations, not enough interoperability, and margin pressure on vendors who sold clean rooms as a destination rather than a feature.
Worth watching who consolidates the plumbing — the cloud platforms, the retail networks, or a third party nobody's betting on yet.
Why 2025 Marked The End Of The Data Clean Room Era