Privacy is the driving force behind massive change in the advertising industry

When we decided to create Optable it was driven by what we saw as massive changes coming to the way that audience-based advertising worked. This evolution has not been understated as gigantic events such data privacy regulations, changes to how Apple’s massive ecosystem interacts with the advertising industry, and the deprecation of 3rd party cookies across the internet have all received their fair share of airtime. That said, the story is deeper than your typical tech mantra of “disruption brings opportunity.” The mission of the founders of Optable can best be described by what we commonly refer to as “privacy-safe advertising.” At a high level, that may seem oversimplified but the mission here is more than privacy. It's really about empowering media owners and their advertising partners to respect their audience and create a more sustainable, enjoyable and performant experience for all parties - and that all starts with privacy. 

Privacy is the driving force behind so many of the changes that are shaping our industry and it has been the “nail in the coffin” for one of the biggest pieces of ad tech - the legacy DMP. This is exactly why we have spent countless hours going back to the drawing board and re-architecting the DMP from the ground up so that it can support the needs of the media & advertising industry now and in the future. Today we would like to more formally introduce the Optable DMP along with our data activation solution, Optable Activate, and data clean-room solution Optable Collaborate.
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A brief history of DMPs

Data Management Platforms (or DMPs) have evolved dramatically in the last 15 years. They were initially hailed as groundbreaking technologies that could empower media owners, publishers and marketers to better leverage their own data as well as partner data for monetization, content creation and marketing. As digital advertising behemoths emerged and audience-based media buying boomed as the default method of advertising, DMPs chased the opportunities in monetization leading to most first-generation DMPs being relegated to cookie-matching and data reselling through DSP endpoints. Changes in browser-based consent and advancements in cross-device identity spawned a new-wave of DMPs that were less cookie-focused and while many first-generation DMPs were acquired by companies that also have large amounts of consumer data such as Salesforces acquisition of Krux and Nielsen's acquisition of eXelate. Meanwhile the Marketer community fully embraced CDPs as an alternative to DMPs given their greater focus on marketing automation and customer journey analysis. 
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Privacy-centric changes have accelerated and the market needs innovative solutions

What we have seen post-pandemic is that consumer privacy demands are accelerating and the  3rd party data frameworks that fueled tons of data leakage from publishers are now becoming unacceptable from a consumer point-of-view. This is driving a massive shift in the execution of audience-based media buying back to the media owners. As we talk to our customers, we continuously hear many of those first and second generation DMPs just simply don't satisfy their needs as they aren’t built to support a new wave of innovation like data clean room collaboration, and device/browser-focused activation, and scalable real-time audience management across many sites and devices. As a result, we decided to revisit audience data management from a foundation level and re-build the architecture that the media owner and publisher community need to build sustainable revenue growth and deliver great content experience to their audiences.
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Optable is focused on building modern audience data management architecture

Over the last couple years we have worked with many of our customers and prospects to comprehensively map out their cross-organizational requirements as it relates to audience data management. Today, we are focused on building future-proof solutions to monetization but long-term we know the DMP is a central brain for many media owners and publishers and are architecting a solution that can also build a better content experience and solve major marketing challenges. In order to guide our work, we have created 4 principles that shape our DMP:

1. We need to integrate privacy by design - Privacy is the number one force changing our ecosystem and therefore with every capability we develop we are focused on using not only best-in-class privacy technologies but also customizable privacy & data governance controls depending on an organizations need.

2. We need identity solutions that are fully flexible and ecosystem compatible - With a rapidly shifting landscape in audience identity we have focused on developing a platform that can integrate, normalize and orchestrate across both all of your own data sources as well as industry frameworks and 3rd parties. 

3. We need to rethink data activation - This goes beyond just campaign activation to data activation broadly. This means out-of-the-box solutions for data clean room collaboration and seamless integration with all of the right advertising platforms.

4. We need solutions that can scale with a publisher's current resources - Very few media companies have the resources and capabilities to build and maintain data management solutions themselves. We are focused on building for the business user and are shaping both our technology and commercial model so that it can deliver value that is in line with our customers goals and operations.
5. Add something about commercial dynamics 

Our goal is to deliver long term value to our customers and help provide them with a platform for which they can create scalable growth in their businesses. If you are a media owner or publisher and are looking to update or evolve your data strategy - we would love to speak with you!

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