Advanced advertising company OpenAP has scored an investment from Snowflake Ventures, the venture capital arm of cloud computing firm Snowflake, bolstering the development of OpenAP’s Data Hub – the company’s cross platform clean room product.
The investment means Snowflake is now a minority owner of OpenAP. Snowflake is the first non-television company to claim an ownership stake in OpenAP, joining major media stakeholders Fox, NBCUniversal, Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery.
OpenAP is leveraging Snowflake to create a platform that easily measures and distributes consumer data in a privacy-safe environment. The media companies are the first to demo the OpenAP Data Hub, first announced in June. OpenAP will release an initial set of data and services for the product in the fourth quarter.
The upcoming release will come with customizable OpenIDs – unique identifiers that locate audiences across linear and streaming – which advertisers can use to better measure audiences both on the individual and household level.
“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,” Fox, NBCU, Paramount and WBD said in a joint statement. “By expanding the Snowflake partnership, we are putting data and identity at the center of OpenAP.”
The OpenAP Data Hub is geared towards brands, TV publishers, cross platform measurement providers and others who want to improve targeted campaigns while ensuring consumer data is secure.
Roku earlier this year unveiled a similar clean room product, allowing advertisers to match their encrypted first-party data with Roku’s audience data – without sharing any identifiable data about Roku consumers.
Snowflake’s investment comes at the heels of OpenAP’s recent announcement that OpenID audiences can now be used with FreeWheel, Magnite and Xandr’s supply-side platforms for programmatic advertising.
OpenAP’s technology paves the way for more efficient programmatic ad buying, as TVRev’s Alan Wolk noted in a recent column. As people consume media both through streaming and linear, advertisers need to figure out how to equally reach those audiences across the board.
Fox, NBCU, Paramount and WBD are poised to advance cross platform measurement, Wolk added, as they collectively control and sell a lot of inventory.
OpenAP CEO David Levy noted the company’s media stakeholders have put “significant resources into allowing their data to unlock new cross-platform use cases for advertisers.”
“The partnership with Snowflake is a critical step forward in giving us the scale needed to build the foundation in which all cross-platform targeting and measurement will be done in the future,” Levy stated.
In other news related to cross platform advertising, Fox last week struck a deal with Innovid to enhance audience measurement across its linear and streaming portfolio – including Fox’s news networks and Tubi, its free ad-supported streaming service.