Ep 10: PAIR and clean rooms

A cookware brand wanted its customers on a recipe site.

PAIR is an IAB Tech Lab standard for matching two email lists while both stay encrypted.

It runs in a clean room, a secure space where two companies’ data meets under strict rules. Recipes.example has, say, two hundred thousand subscriber emails. The brand has fifty thousand customers. Each list is hashed and locked with its owner’s secret key, then the other side’s key is added. The maths is commutative, so lock order doesn’t matter, and double-locked emails match without anyone seeing an address. Say eight thousand match. The publisher gets an encrypted ID for every reader, never learning who matched. The brand’s DSP gets only the eight thousand. When one visits, her ID rides in the bid request, and the DSP bids.

Today, count your logged-in and newsletter readers. That’s the audience PAIR can work with.

Next series… Season six, video, CTV and apps.