Snowflake acquires stake in OpenAP to set up data clean room for advertisers

Snowflake Ventures, the venture capital arm of data cloud company Snowflake, today announced an investment in advanced TV advertising firm OpenAP. The financial terms of the deal, which reportedly gives the data leader a 5% stake, were not disclosed.

OpenAP was founded in 2017 by a consortium of television publishers to provide advertisers and agencies with a standard open platform for cross-publisher audience targeting and independent posting. It enabled audience data activation, moving the industry from the siloed targeting and measurement of linear and streaming viewership to consistent ID-based targeting and measurement across platforms.

To further simplify this effort, a few months ago, the ad-tech firm partnered with Snowflake and announced the plan to launch a dedicated clean room solution called OpenAP data hub.

What does OpenAP data hub do?

As explained by the companies, the OpenAP data hub will serve as a privacy-compliant centralized destination where publishers can store and share rich but anonymized cross-platform audience data, including OpenID spine and TV data appended to the spine — covering OpenAP demographic audiences, custom audiences and OpenID exposure data. This ‘clean room’ information can then be accessed by advertisers and agencies to power more effective audiences for targeting and measurement. In other words, no more need to move it through different hands.

With the latest investment, Snowflake said it will help OpenAP accelerate the development and speed-to-market of the clean room solution. The move also makes the data giant the first non-publisher to take an ownership stake in OpenAP.

In a joint statement by Dan Callahan, SVP of data strategy and sales innovation at FOX; Krishan Bhatia, president & chief business officer at NBCUniversal; John Halley, president at Paramount Advertising; and Jim Keller, EVP of digital ad sales and advanced advertising at Warner Bros Discovery, the execs noted that “The future of video advertising will be defined by rich audience and viewing data that provides actionable insights to advertisers while protecting consumer privacy and ensuring sensitive data is not shared from party to party. By expanding the Snowflake partnership, we are putting data and identity at the center of OpenAP.”

By the fourth quarter of 2022, the companies claim there will be an initial release of data and services to the OpenAP data hub. This will provide access to full custom-hashed OpenID person and household identity spines for OpenAP clients to use in resolving in-house or third-party identity services to better facilitate identity enrichment, analysis and secure sharing of OpenAP and customer audience, planning and measurement data.

The data hub will also have a develop-and-release cadence to build out the clean room solution and capabilities needed by core constituents, including TV publishers, cross-platform measurement providers, agencies, brands and audience and attribution data providers, who are looking to run targeted advertising campaigns that preserve a high standard of consumer data privacy and governance. Plus, it will use pre-built native Snowflake functions for easier and faster uploading and distribution of data.

Currently, OpenAP works with over 100 advertisers, and the launch of this solution is expected to further grow that number, boosting the company’s position in the data-led TV advertising space.

Originally appeared on: TheSpuzz