Snowflake Ventures has made an investment in OpenAP, taking a minority stake in the advanced TV advertising company.
The investment by the venture capital arm of data cloud company Snowflake, will stimulate the development of OpanAP’s cross-platform, clean room data hub as the industry moves towards data-driven, audience based advertising campaigns.
“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 deal gives OpenAP, owned by Fox, NBCUniversal, Paramount Global and Warner Bros.Discovery, its first non-TV publisher owner.
Financial terms were not disclosed but Snowflake’s stake in OpenAP is about 5%, according to a source familiar with the situation.
“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 CEO David Levy.
OpenAP announced it was developing its Data Hub and working with Snowflake in June.
The OpenAP Data Hub will enable access to the OpenID spine and TV data appended to the spine, including OpenAP demographic audiences, custom audiences and OpenID exposure data
Pre-built Snowflake functions will make it easier and faster to upload and distribute data, facilitating more effective cross-publisher and cross-platform planning, targeting and measurement in privacy-safe environments, OpenAP said.
“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, senior VP, Data Strategy and Sales Innovation at Fox; Krishan Bhatia, President & Chief Business Officer at NBCUniversal; John Halley, President at Paramount Advertising, and Jim Keller, executive VP, Digital Ad Sales and Advanced Advertising at Warner Bros Discovery, in a joint statement. ■
