IAB Tech Lab finalises ECAPI clean-room transfer guidance

What changed

The final guidelines and the proposed specification update have different statuses. The clean-room transfer guidance is ready for implementers; the v1.1 changes remain open for feedback. ECAPI v1.0 already existed, so this is not the first publication of the standard.

The guidelines describe a common event object and Parquet-based transfer for sending conversion-event data into clean rooms. The v1.1 proposal clarifies hashing and encryption. Those technical definitions are intended to help implementations agree on the structure of exchanged data rather than each requiring an unrelated event format.

For a retail-media or measurement team, the useful question is whether the receiving environment supports the same event definitions and transfer conventions. A vendor saying that it accepts conversion data does not necessarily establish compatibility with this particular specification or version.

Implementation review should distinguish a field’s format from its business meaning. Two events can conform to a schema while representing different conversion stages, time zones or revenue definitions. Teams still need to document those choices when comparing results across partners, and the existence of a standard does not supply permission to share personal data.

The article links to Wittkopp’s original announcement so implementers can follow the final guidance and proposed changes separately. No public-comment deadline was established in the material reviewed, so none is invented here. The author portrait is credited to IAB Tech Lab and should not be mistaken for a diagram of the transfer protocol. This is a standards update, not a recommendation for a particular clean-room provider.