Through a deal with Snowflake, Open AP, the advanced advertising company owned by major U.S. TV network groups, is starting a clean room effort "that will be cross platform and cross publisher."

NBCUniversal, Paramount Global, Fox Corp. and Warner Bros. Discovery -- TV network owners of OpenAP -- will be the first to participate.

Snowflake, a data cloud company, will develop OpenAP Data Hub, a clean room service for “more effective audiences for targeting and measurement.”

Traditionally, “clean rooms” are places where media sellers can safely share and match data with advertisers and their first-party data without violating user privacy.

This can be accomplished by sharing aggregated data – data organized in groups -- rather than by individual customer data.

David Levy, chief executive officer of OpenAP, said the Snowflake deal is designed to be “open and interoperable” and will maintain the privacy of viewer data. A key feature for OpenAP is that its operation comes from multiple TV network publishers.

Executives at TV networks who are backing the move said in the statement that this is the future of advertising for brand messages “wherever consumers are viewing video without ever having to move or copy data for identity resolution and enrichment.”

OpenAP says this 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.

Initial availability of the OpenAP Data Hub will launch in October of this year for use in the 2022-2023 TV season.