Highlights:
- With this deal, Snowflake becomes the first publisher without a TV network to own a piece of OpenAP.
- Snowflake’s investment in OpenAP will speed up the development of the OpenAP Data Hub and help it get to market faster.
OpenAP, an advanced advertising company that makes audience-based TV campaigns easy and scalable, announced that it had received an investment from Snowflake Ventures, the venture capital arm of Snowflake, the Data Cloud firm. The investment builds on the existing business relationship and will significantly speed up the development of the OpenAP Data Hub, which is TV’s cross-platform and cross-publisher clean room offering.
With this deal, Snowflake becomes the first publisher without a TV network to stake a claim in OpenAP. This comes at a time when advanced audiences have seen significant growth and continuous advancement from buying on traditional age-gender demos to transacting using consistent ID-based audiences across all platforms. The addition of Snowflake confirms the obligation made by the likes of Fox, NBCUniversal, Paramount, and Warner Bros to alter the TV ad industry via OpenAP with generic solutions that scale multiple publishers and signal the role of data privacy in the TV advertising workflow.
Dan Callahan, SVP, Data Strategy and Sales Innovation at FOX; Krishan Bhatia, President and 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 said, “The future of video advertising will be defined by the 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.”
Snowflake’s investment in OpenAP will speed up the development and speed to market of the OpenAP Data Hub. The OpenAP Data Hub, launched in June this year, is a new cleanroom solution for the television industry that Snowflake powers. It will give publishers, and advertisers access to rich, cross-platform data in environments that respect privacy to strengthen more effective audiences for targeting and measurement. Following up on the investment will be an initial release of data and services to the OpenAP Data Hub in the fourth quarter of 2022. This release will offer OpenAP clients complete, custom-hashed OpenID person and household identity spines that can be used to connect to in-house or third-party identity services. This will smoothen the way for identity enrichment, analysis and secure sharing of OpenAP and customer audience, planning and measurement data.
Bill Stratton, Head of Media, Entertainment, and Advertising at Snowflake, said, “Since OpenAP’s inception, the programmers have proven that collaboration and partnership is a powerful mechanism in transforming the entire television advertising industry. With this partnership and investment, cross-cloud data collaboration at scale will accelerate that transformation.”
OpenAP Chief Executive Officer David Levy said, “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 critiscal 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.”
