OpenAP, the advanced advertising company bringing simplicity and scale to audience-based campaigns in television, announced an investment from Snowflake Ventures, the venture capital arm of Snowflake, the Data Cloud company. The investment expands on the existing commercial relationship and will significantly accelerate the development of the OpenAP Data Hub, TV’s cross-platform and cross-publisher clean room solution.
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With this deal, Snowflake becomes the first non-television publisher to take an ownership stake in OpenAP and comes with a backdrop of historic growth of advanced audiences and the continued evolution from buying on traditional age gender demos to transacting using consistent ID-based audiences across all platforms. The addition of Snowflake validates the commitment Fox, NBCUniversal, Paramount and Warner Bros Discovery have made to transforming the TV ad industry through OpenAP with common solutions that scale multiple publishers and signals the role data privacy will have in the TV advertising workflow.
“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,” said Dan Callahan, SVP, 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, Digital Ad Sales and Advanced Advertising at Warner Bros Discovery in a joint statement.
Snowflake’s investment in OpenAP will accelerate the development and speed to market of the OpenAP Data Hub. First introduced in June 2022, the OpenAP Data Hub is a new clean room solution for the television industry that is Powered by Snowflake and will give publishers and advertisers access to rich, cross-platform data in privacy-compliant environments to power more effective audiences for targeting and measurement. The investment will be followed by an initial release of data and services to the OpenAP Data Hub in the fourth quarter of calendar year 2022. This release will provide full custom-hashed OpenID person and household identity spines for OpenAP clients to use in resolving to 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.
“Since OpenAP’s inception, the programmers have proven that collaboration and partnership is a powerful mechanism in transforming the entire television advertising industry. Now with this partnership and investment, cross-cloud data collaboration at scale will accelerate that transformation,” said Bill Stratton, Head, Media, Entertainment & Advertising at Snowflake.
“The publishers have put significant resources into allowing their data to unlock new cross-platform use cases for advertisers and 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. We are proud to expand our strategic alliance with Snowflake as we drive further innovation and growth of the marketplace,” said OpenAP Chief Executive Officer David Levy.