The data clean room has become among the most attractive post-cookie options. But the proliferation of so many clean rooms is where things start to get messy.

Additional coverage:

• Instacart is essentially weaponizing its troves of sales data from consumers searching and purchasing online, to the benefit of media agencies and brands. Omnicom struck a strategic partnership with Instacart that involves sharing of data and measurement that can more directly tie sales to TV advertising.
• On one end of the Croisette, TikTok has quietly launched its first presence to do the wheeling and dealing with the industry it has missed out on the last two years as well as partner with marketers and advertisers on a personal level. A few blocks down, Meta has returned in a similar force to years prior. Read this and more in today's Cannes Briefing.
• Today's Cannes Podcast features Joanna O'Connell, vp and principal analyst with Forrester Research, who offered an unvarnished view of the ills of the industry while crediting some corners of ad tech for trying to make things better.
• For brands looking to burnish their metaverse credentials, always-on spaces are perhaps the best option -- but they are also a much heavier lift. For now, limited-time, event-based Roblox activations are more popular among both users and brands.
• Here's everything you need to know about the role of employee resource groups at companies, and how they are changing.
• Initiative Brands4News, self-funded by Ebiquity’s group chief product officer Ruben Schreurs, is a vehicle for different ways to help advertisers support quality journalism. Think creative formats, open source lists of trusted sites and thought leadership.
• ProtonMail rebranded itself and started offering more than email, forming a privacy-focused ecosystem including its email, VPN, cloud storage and calendar.
• Branded assets give brands control over how their intellectual properties are expressed in-game — but once the assets are coded in, players can mix them up however they like.
• Digiday asked agency and brand executives for their predictions about who stands to win and who will lose with the end of the third-party cookie -- and found that the industry anticipates more losers than winners.