All around the world, the right to consumer privacy is being painstakingly tightened up through legislation. In Canada, that process takes the form of Bill C-27, a stronger, modernized legal privacy and data protection framework that governs the protection of individuals’ personal information, as well as the legitimate need of organisations to collect, use or disclose aspects of that information. And just like everywhere else, publishers, advertisers and ad platforms operating in Canada must be ready to comply.

Bill C27: Canadian privacy legislation

New privacy legislation is inevitably daunting for businesses, particularly when it limits commercially important applications of data. But there are ways to continue making effective and strategic use of data without violating consumers’ right to privacy.

The right way to collaborate on the basis of audience data is by using the data clean room approach. Data clean rooms focus on enabling collaboration between partners using audience or customer data, enabling personalization of offers and content, but with transparency and privacy controls at the heart of the user experience.

Optable is a data clean room solution that is uniquely positioned to serve Canadian customers.
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Optable data clean room platform: A made in Canada solution

• We are a private Canadian company, already fully compliant with the EU’s established GDPR laws

• Ideally for Canadian publishers and advertisers, our hosting takes place in Canada, with none of our infrastructure based in the US or elsewhere

• We don’t undertake probabilistic matching on our platform - in other words, we don’t identify users across different devices and applications

• We are ID-agnostic and do not operate a global identifier of any sort

• We fully support the consent element of the legislation, according to which organisations are generally required to obtain meaningful consent for the collection, use and disclosure of personal information 

• We offer robust data subject request support, for maximum transparency and compliance

• Our differential privacy features prevent the re-identification of individuals

• We collect first-party data in real time, using the client’s domain name. This data remains the legitimate property of the owners - Optable does not sell, rebundle or use audience and customer data in any way

• We are integrated for activation. Our platform snaps right into any client’s existing activation infrastructure using Prebid, SDA and ad server integration - no need to export data

• We create purpose-limited clean rooms that give our clients complete control of the outcome 

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Amid the upheaval of broad-based new privacy legislation, data clean rooms are a compliant oasis of data collaboration, allowing companies to plan, measure and activate campaigns securely, with full regard for privacy, transparency and regulatory compliance. So if the many positive aspects of Bill C-27 seem to come with a sting in the tail for your data practices, data clean rooms are the privacy-preserving solution.

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Photo by Jason Hafso on Unsplash

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This article was originally published on LinkedIn.

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Optable Core Values

We value diversity and inclusion and believe that the sum of different cultures, opinions and beliefs creates a stronger team that will deliver great results. A group of people with the desire to succeed. All pulling together in the same direction. Knowing that every single person has your back. With respect, trust, and the knowledge that any single one of our teammates is capable of taking the lead at the right time. With this attitude we all win. And when we don’t, we try again.  Because we learn quickly and don’t give up. 

Empathy

Showing empathy towards each other is probably the best way to get the most out of any given team. Every day brings new challenges but also new opportunities to reconsider how we see and value our colleagues. Empathy also helps us focus on listening. It forces us to reflect on our actions and words and it brings us closer together.

Trust

Building trust in our relationships is our promise. We are all about transparency in communication and actions. We are honest, we own our role, decisions, actions, and their consequences. We strive for an environment where we can rely on each other.  Trust is earned. And we never, ever make fake promises.

Innovation

Challenging one’s own thinking and having the mindset to strive for continuous improvement is what innovation means to us. We encourage curiosity, challenge assumptions, take calculated risks,  and anticipate changes. Failure is welcomed. It’s what allows us to learn and generate new ideas while enabling us to embrace changes and drive faster towards success.

Enthusiasm

Promoting excellence in the workplace is what enthusiastic employees do. It’s infectious, and an example for those around them to follow. It’s the core understanding that energy comes from energy so we recognize and reward those brave enough to smile in the face of challenge. We play to win as a team and lift everyone’s spirits to bring joy, satisfaction, and results.

Bias for Action

Taking initiative and embracing change help create a successful business. We don’t spend too much time overthinking decisions. We prefer acting on possible solutions instead of waiting for the perfect one. If it needs to get done, we identify solutions and start building. We are not perfectionists, but we work relentlessly to improve.

Why did I join Optable?

When did you first realise that GAFA (Google and Facebook, followed quickly by Amazon and Apple), had become so dominant in digital advertising that the very idea of a free and open internet was under threat? I was like a frog in increasingly tepid water, going about my mundane existence, until one day it felt like it was almost too late. 

I do believe the big tech platforms can be a force for good. Yet a world where journalism, content, commerce, entertainment, and even transportation is dominated by a small number of powerful companies starts to feel very dystopian very quickly; and while I do not believe their motives should be distrusted, I do believe their power should be checked. I'm not an advocate for government intervention in markets - I believe innovation and disruption can do the job. 

I would argue that there are three things which have enabled GAFA's dominance of the digital ads market. Centralised identity, aggregation of first-party data and a divided eco-system of brands, publishers, and intermediaries who have no choice but to conform and partner with the dominant players even if it is not in their best interest to do so. 

An open and fair digital ads market. Is, in my view, a vital component of a free and open internet. How can the supply and demand side of the digital marketing ecosystem embrace fragmentation, leverage de-centralisation and disrupt the incumbent players?  By creating a whole new paradigm based on cooperation, collaboration and mutually aligned interest.

Centralisation drove dominance for GAFA

Google, Facebook, and Amazon have built massive empires off the back of centralised identity structures on both the mobile and desktop internet. Recently, they’ve extended this to CTV and smart home devices,enabling them to aggregate more audience data than had ever been imagined possible.  Essentially, everything they see and touch becomes a valuable source of first-party data which can be used to drive outcomes for advertisers.

The ecosystem of independent publishers, media owners, agencies, and platforms are almost powerless in the face of this. Government intervention in the form of privacy legislation has inadvertently made matters worse by strengthening the centralised platforms while increasing fragmentation on the open internet and further dividing the ecosystem.

Decentralisation of identity and audience data is a force for disruption

The way to challenge dominant centralised structures is not with more centralisation. In the same way that defi is attacking the institutions of centralised finance, the digital marketing ecosystem can leverage fragmentation, encourage decentralisation, challenge the status quo, and create an entirely new paradigm for data-driven advertising. 

In order to turn decentralisation into an attack vector, independent media owners, brands, and mar-tech intermediaries must find ways to collaborate and share data which respect user privacy, preserve data sovereignty, ensure compliance, and enable activation at scale.

Introducing Optable: Decentralised Data Collaboration for the Digital Marketing EcoSystem - Built In Montreal

It's been said that we are seeing a renewed cycle of innovation in digital marketing - new platforms are emerging and new ways of working are being defined. Optable is not the first company to blaze this trail and I will offer a respectful tip of the hat to those that have been focused here ahead of us. Healthy competition and offering choice to clients will ultimately benefit the ecosystem as a whole.

Vlad Stesin, Bosko Milekic, and Yves Poire have assembled an experienced team of product designers and engineers to build Optable off the back of their experience as the founders of DSP and ad-serving platform Ad Gear, which became the foundation of Samsung’s CTV advertising business. With privacy, security, and data sovereignty at its core, Optable has been built for a connected TV world; the platform is a game changer and I could not be more excited to join the team as Chief Revenue Officer.

This week Google's announcement somehow managed to send shockwaves through the ad tech world.  In essence, they've confirmed what has been communicated between the lines for a long time: Google has no interest in helping other platforms in any way.  There is a clear path towards cutting out the competition, doing so under the promise of privacy and "greater good."

This is the greatest opportunity for adtech in a long time.

At Optable, our focus is on data connectivity for this new era in ad tech.  Our thesis is simple:

1. Privacy is now a feature in software, and that trend is not stopping
2. Legislation around personal data protection is going to continue to proliferate around the world

This is all leading to a world with more walled gardens that care deeply about their first party data, curating that data with direct consent provided by end-users.

As a result, the best way to compete with the incumbents is to work together on the basis of this data.  Prior to the erosion of global identifiers, this connectivity layer wasn't necessary. The whole ecosystem was stitched up using cookies and MAIDs.  Now, it is very much is tablestakes.

To make this collaboration easier while improving on trust issues, we are now offering new ways to connect data, ways that are anchored in security and privacy, using cryptography as an enabler.

The future is not going to lean on one identity framework that replaces global identifiers: the new ecosystem will be constructed using a patchwork of identity frameworks, operating in and around walled gardens, connecting data to each other without sacrificing users' privacy.

How exciting is that?

When we launched the company earlier this year, in the middle of a global pandemic, our thesis was fairly simple:

• As privacy becomes a feature across the board, both tech platform changes and increased regulation will make a huge impact on ad tech
  

• This will create a movement where publishers and advertisers (as well as a slew of intermediaries) will have to actively ask users to share some data on themselves and get a permission to use it
  

• The infrastructure that enabled data-driven advertising to function was built on cookies and IFAs, and it’s about to disappear
  

• As a result, this data-sharing infrastructure is moving underground where collaboration will continue, but data will be shared using secure, privacy-preserving protocols
  

This all will result in a gradual onset of confusion and chaos, but ultimately, eventually, the ecosystem will be better off. The mess created by the programmatic revolution will be replaced by less wasteful, more ethical, more secure, new ways of dealing with ads.

It starts with three core functions that have to be satisfied by a new generation of customer data management technologies:

First, we need to deal with the identity crisis, with third-party cookies and IFAs slowly crumbling. We need a way to collect data that is respectful of the user and backed by consent, yet still uses identity data at the core. Without third-party cookies and IFAs, this will lead to a translation layer: from personal profiles stored by the publisher on the user to an addressable cohort across various touch-points (open web as much as mobile, CTV and audio). In addition to using local storage for data collection, there is also an opportunity to make use of first-party cookies, just like it was in the good ol’ days.

Second, although we do ingest data from CDPs and DMPs, assembling audiences and preparing them for anonymized activation using existing ad tech infrastructure is part of the the new way of working with audience data.  This activation can happen through ad servers, ad exchanges or other content personalization technologies.

And third, we need better ways to transact based on audience data.  When it comes to advertising, the value of data is amplified when it transits between partners. Cookie and IFA-based transaction models created a lot of trust issues which actually prevented great use of this data. The new generation of data management technologies will be decentralized, where partners will run their individual instances of the platform, and use secure multiparty computation protocols to collaborate.  This is a bit complicated at first, but ultimately this layer will enable the fundamental fabric of how ads are targeted and measured.

That, in essence, is what we do.

A mere 6 months after launching the company, we are starting to roll out our product to customers. It’s quite difficult to describe what the product IS, but we feel that calling it a Data Connectivity Platform is the best way to describe the core value that we’re bringing.

Having pre-seeded the company ourselves, we are also starting a fundraising process for our seed round. Our team counts 9 people now, and we are very much excited to grow it and accelerate our growth.

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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