Snowflake invests in advertising identity data company OpenAP

Snowflake announced on Monday that it has invested in OpenAP, making it the first non-television publisher to take ownership in the company which is co-owned by Comcast’s NBCUniversal, Fox, Paramount, and Warner Bros. Discovery.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. 

Since launching its OpenAP clean room solution for the television industry in June, Snowflake has already been OpenAP’s data clean room infrastructure provider. OpenAp said 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.

Powered by a standards-based approach to data activation, OpenAP enables advertisers to onboard audiences centrally for use in planning, campaign execution and measurement across the largest footprint of premium video advertising. It makes it possible for unified ID-based audiences to be used for targeting and measurement across any TV publisher in both linear and digital viewing environments.

“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.

 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. 

“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.