Montreal-based data platform Optable has expanded its relationship with cloud company Snowflake, part of the company’s efforts to bring greater interoperability in the buzzy world of clean room technology.
Through the integration, publishers and media owners will be able to activate audiences based on matches made in Snowflake’s clean room functionality, without data being moved out of the data cloud. In addition to being a privacy-safe way to manage consumer data, it also aims to make the process simpler.
“A publisher that uses Optable can work with any advertiser that uses Snowflake, and those advertisers don’t have to move data out of Snowflake,” says Vlad Stesin, co-founder and chief strategy officer of Optable. “We want to build an ‘easy button’ for the entire advertising industry to work using audience data in a way that will be secure and compliant and privacy-preserved.”
Stesin notes that Snowflake’s size and large client base made it a clear first choice for a partnership based around ease of connection. Snowflake clients include Capital One, Jet Blue, Pizza Hut and Rakuten.
Clean room tech allows companies – most commonly, an advertiser and a publisher – to compare their first-party data. This allows them to find inconsistencies or overlap so they can eliminate duplication, apply frequency capping, report on the performance of campaigns and provide attribution. It can also find connections between data points, which can be used to target ads to specific audiences. Because no data ever leaves the clean room platform, this makes the targeting privacy-safe, which is more important than ever with the impeding deprecation of third-party cookies and tightening privacy restrictions in many jurisdictions.
The technology has been a major area of investment in the industry over the last year, but Stesin says where Optable aims to stand out is by focusing on interoperability. Some of that is offered by things like the Snowflake integration, as well through things like an open-source approach that allows any third party to examine and vet its code.
“Our goal is to make sure that no matter what the publisher’s partner uses, whether it’s a database like Snowflake or another data clean room provider, we offer an interoperable approach allowing anybody to match with our customers,” he says. “If our industry does not focus on interoperability, the result will be a million different constellations. That’s frustrating and not conducive to publisher monetizing inventory or advertisers getting performance and precision that they need.”
Stesin says announcements about partners that will provide further interoperability are expected in the near future. Last year, the company also became a private operator for The Trade Desk’s UID 2.0, allowing clients to activate first-party data gleaned from the post-cookie identifier directly from the Optable clean room.
