The data clean room category is like wet cement right now. And Snowflake is writing its name everywhere.
On Monday, Snowflake announced an investment in OpenAP, an advertising identity data company co-owned by Comcast’s NBCUniversal, Fox, Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery.
Terms of the investment were not disclosed.
“Snowflake is the first non-TV network investor for us and has important significance in terms of our growth and trajectory,” OpenAP CEO David Levy told AdExchanger.
For one thing, OpenAP was originally conceived as a “consortium-based” business, Levy said. In the past few years, it’s turned its focus to helping broadcasters and advertisers use their own first-party data to target and measure campaigns, instead of being an aggregated TV data set among its joint-venture owners. The change makes it a more traditional advertising data and technology company working beyond its shareholders.
Frequency management was OpenAP’s first killer use case. By deduplicating the audiences from across various networks, the consortium model made data-driven linear TV ratings more effective.
But advertisers are most excited about the opportunity to understand who specifically was served an ad, Levy said, not just an understanding of how many total people were reached.
For that, you need shared first-party data between TV network and advertiser. And for that, you need a data clean room.
Snowflake was already OpenAP’s data clean room infrastructure provider, since OpenAP debuted its clean room solution at Cannes in June. But when that commercial partnership started to produce, both companies realized the opportunity for a partnership to become an investment.
“Once we had started locking arms and moving forward together to build out the OpenAP Data Hub [the data clean room solution], it made sense to formalize the investments in time and engineering commitments with an actual, well, investment,” Levy said.
Broadcasters and advertisers have also pulled back on data going to third parties.
“Site pixels that send log file data out and SDKs are under closer scrutiny,” Levy said. “Programmers are taking more ownership and control over their data and now have a clear understanding of how they’re sharing data with third parties.”
That privacy-focused trend makes clean room technology like Snowflake’s more important. And, critically, as an equity investor, Snowflake and OpenAP can claim a sort of hybrid first-party relationship, whereas even a very close commercial partnership is still sharing data between third parties.
This is also not a new tactic for Snowflake, which has taken ad tech by storm since the company officially launched a Media Cloud business exactly one year ago.
Last November, Snowflake and Habu, another data clean room tech provider, announced a partnership to integrate Habu’s tech with Snowflake for joint customers. A week later, Snowflake became a minority investor in Habu.
And OpenAP probably won’t be Snowflake’s final strategic partnership-turned-investment. Snowflake has shown it’s willing to lock in exclusive or important footholds in the market, by hook or crook or a look at their book.
