NEW YORK – The venture capital unit of data cloud company Snowflake this week announced an investment in OpenAP, the advanced advertising platform formed in a collaboration with major U.S. media companies.
Bill Stratton, global head, media, entertainment and advertising vertical at Snowflake, offered more insights into the investment in this conversation with Beet.TV at Advertising Week in New York.
“The investment is important to us,” he said. “OpenAP felt like it was a really good fit for us.”
He pointed to OpenAP’s formation as a joint venture among Comcast’s NBCUniversal, Fox, Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery to demonstrate their shared goals in collaboration.
“We announced a commercial deal in June [with OpenAP], and what the investment does then is follow up –, OpenAP having more resources from Snowflake,” he said, “and not just monetary resources: technology and roadmap capability from Snowflake.”
Innovations with Data Clean Rooms
Amid stricter laws about privacy and consumer concerns about data breaches, advertisers are looking for ways to get the most out of different sources of consumer data without intermingling it in ways that data brokers can easily make the information personally identifiable. Data clean rooms are one way for advertisers and media companies to cross-check data without giving away proprietary information.
“We’ve built further privacy-enhancing features into Snowflake, but what we don’t do is actually have an application or an interface or a GUI that sits on top of Snowflake,” Stratton said. “We have partners and customers who have built that.”
Snowflake works with a variety of publishers and media companies, including those that aren’t part of OpenAP, that want flexibility in creating solutions based on a data cloud technology.
“We basically started interoperability on top of the cloud platforms,” Stratton said. “Continuing that within our operability between agencies, marketers and advertisers and certainly big media companies like today is going be an important topic — and privacy is always there.”
