• by Wayne Friedman , October 17, 2022

OpenAP, the advanced advertising company owned by major TV companies, is taking on a non-TV company as an investor -- Snowflake Ventures, the venture-capital arm of data cloud company Snowflake.

Financial terms were not disclosed. Snowflake will be a minority owner.

OpenAP says the Snowflake Ventures deal expands on existing relationships and aims to increase the speed to market of cross-platform and cross-publisher clean room solutions.

In June of this year, the OpenAP Data Hub started up as a new clean room powered by Snowflake. NBCUniversal, Paramount, Fox and Warner Brothers Discovery are the first TV publishers to participate.

Network executives in OpenAP say that one key reason for the deal is further “data and identity” issues.

In Septemberm OpenAP made deals for its identity graph, Open ID, to work with three big programmatic supply-side platforms -- FreeWheel, Magnite and Xandr’s Monetize SSP.

In 2021, OpenAP made a deal with The Trade Desk for interoperability between the OpenID and Unified ID 2.0 -- the industry-wide initiative that The Trade Desk has been promoting to create an alternative to digital media third-party cookies.