Snowflake acquires stake in OpenAP to set up data cleanroom for advertisers

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

OpenAP was founded in 2017 by a consortium of television publishers to provide advertisers and agencies with a standard open platform for audience targeting between different publishers and independent publications. It enabled audience data activation, moving the industry from silo-centric targeting and metering of linear and streaming viewers to consistent ID-based targeting and metering across platforms.

To further simplify this effort, the ad technology company partnered with Snowflake and . a few months ago announced the plan to launch a dedicated cleanroom solution called OpenAP data hub.

What does the OpenAP data hub do?

As the companies have explained, the OpenAP data hub will serve as a privacy-compliant centralized destination where publishers can store and share rich yet anonymized cross-platform audience data, including OpenID backbone and TV data added to the backbone – in regards to demographics. OpenAP audiences, custom audiences, and OpenID exposure data. This clean room information is then accessible to advertisers and agencies to reach more effective audiences for targeting and measurement. In other words, it is no longer necessary to move it through different hands.

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

In a joint statement from 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 shaped by rich audience and viewing data that provides advertisers with actionable insights, while protecting consumer privacy and sensitive data is safeguarded. is not shared from party to party. By expanding the Snowflake partnership, we are putting data and identity at the heart 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 plugs for OpenAP customers to use in resolving internal or external 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 development-and-release cadence to build out the cleanroom solution and capabilities needed by core assets, including TV publishers, cross-platform metering providers, agencies, brands, and providers of audience and attribution data, who are looking to run targeted advertising campaigns that maintain a high standard of consumer data privacy and governance. In addition, it will use pre-built native Snowflake features for easier and faster data upload and distribution.

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