Optable, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) data collaboration platform and clean room solution designed for the advertising ecosystem, has announced that it has secured $20M USD in Series A financing from a syndicate of investors which includes Hearst Ventures, Brightspark Ventures, Desjardins Ventures, Deloitte Ventures, asterX, and others.

The advertising ecosystem is undergoing a radical transformation in how audience data can be used as third-party cookies disappear, mobile IDs experience an overhaul, and new privacy legislation emerges, added the company. This creates an immediate need for new solutions to enable advertisers, publishers, and the entire adtech ecosystem to securely compare and leverage audience data to help plan, activate, and measure campaigns. Against this backdrop, Optable has experienced global demand for its solutions and will use the funds raised to expand its sales and marketing team to serve this need.

“Optable has made enormous progress in delivering a privacy-centric, transparent, and interoperable solution to the market," said Yves Poiré, co-founder and CEO, Optable. "Having such a great and diverse syndicate of strategic investors validates our approach. We look forward to collaborating with them to accelerate our expansion strategy and drive real results for our rapidly growing customer base across the globe."

Optable's co-founders - Yves Poiré, Vlad Stesin and Bosko Milekic - are long-time collaborators, with Optable being the second business they have founded together. Their last venture, AdGear, was acquired by Samsung Ads in 2016. Optable says it currently works with customers in Canada, the US, Europe, and Japan...

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Increased regulation and changes in the data privacy landscape are creating new challenges for brands, agencies and advertisers, which is driving up the prominence of data clean rooms.

Data clean room technology helps publishers and content platforms keep their first person user data private when brands and agencies advertise their products and services on those platforms.  

Here, Vlad Stesin, co-founder and CSO of data collaboration and clean room company, Optable, explains why advertisers should be looking into the technology amid the rise of so-called walled gardens on the web.

No-one with an interest in digital media can have missed the increasing prevalence of the walled garden.

According to eMarketer, at least 70% of digital ad spending goes to Google, Facebook and Amazon, the three most prominent walled-gardeners, while numerous relatively smaller publishers are also encircling their assets and commodifying their rich data in all manner of ways.

Large or comparatively small, there are two main components to a modern media walled garden: quality owned and operated inventory on the one hand, and quality consented audience data on the other.

A modern walled garden in possession of assets like these will not, of course, sell this data or frivolously offer direct access to its inventory to a third party.

Instead, it will do everything it can to protect access to that inventory and maintain its premium quality – although, in some cases, lesser inventory with little or no data may be funnelled through other distribution channels, such as ad exchanges.

The appeal of independence

Today’s advertisers – whether that means brands with in-housed media departments or just the traditional agency representatives – have to contend with the rising number of walled gardens and the complexity of managing the fragmentation they create.

In many ways, the situation marks a return to the pre-programmatic era, when it was extremely hard to achieve scale for quality targeted inventory, and holistic measurement – even simple reach and frequency reporting, let alone cross-publisher attribution – was, like now, increasingly hard to come by. Just talk to the folks who plan CTV campaigns across multiple CTV publishers.

Most of the time they have to fly blind – the only way to get representative results is by spending as much as possible with a single publisher.

In a context like this, it is clear that the reason we hear so much about data clean rooms is only partly because of the deprecation of cookies and MAIDs – although those are clearly important facts of life right now.

But it’s also because, as we have discussed, more and more operators are building their own walled gardens.

To a degree, this building spree has been precipitated by technological and legislative changes related to privacy. But more importantly, it is a reflection of the commercial opportunity that stems from independence and the ability to determine your own destiny...

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In 2023, as the sunsetting of the cookie inches closer, marketers are having to face the facts: if they don’t make changes to their targeting strategies and adopt more privacy-compliant measures, they’ll be left behind.

Contextual targeting, first-party IDs, optimising creative – these are all valid solutions. But the emergence of data clean rooms and data collaboration platforms is bringing another layer of data quality and reliability to the table.

With up to four-fifths (80%) of advertisers expected to use data clean rooms in 2023, they are clearly making waves in the industry. But why?

The answer lies in second-party data capabilities. Publishers and advertisers can make their marketing go further if they augment their existing first-party data with second-party data. Combine that with the fact that such platforms are 100% privacy-compliant and don’t share any user-level data with any of the parties involved, and it’s easy to see why data collaboration platforms have become so popular.

However, with so many different platforms on the market, it can be tricky to decide which one to partner with. Let’s take a closer look at the three main features you should look out for...

In order to read the remainder of this article please visit the New Digital Age website.

Data clean room companies, which help publishers securely match their audience’s first-party data with that of marketers, are aiming to capture more market share as the ad industry seeks more privacy-focused ways of targeting.

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Partly, this will come from offering more interoperability between players, as shown by the recent announcement from data clean room tech companies Optable and Snowflake. Now, a brand that has their data within Snowflake can match with the Optable customer without having their data leave Snowflake’s infrastructure, rather than only matching with audience data within Snowflake. In 2021, Snowflake partnered with data clean room firm Habu to address similar interoperability concerns and accelerate the adoption among marketers. Similar tech integrations are expected this year.

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But interoperability—a catch-all term within the tech industry—continues to befuddle marketers who are wrapping their heads around how data clean rooms work, according to sources...

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To read the remainder of this article please visit the Ad Week web site.

Q: What is a data clean room (DCR) and how have they come about?

A: A data clean room is a secure environment that provides purpose-limited, privacy-preserving ways to collaborate with partners around data. They have come about as a result of gradual deprecation of personal identifiers such as third-party cookies and MAIDs, as well as a rise in privacy legislation. Data clean rooms re-enable the advertising ecosystem to work together, but they do so in ways that are anchored in privacy and security.

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To read the remainder of this article please visit InPublishing.com.

On Thursday, Optable became the latest company to partner with The Trade Desk via UID2. The integration is in closed beta and set to go live for all Optable customers in Q4.

Unified ID 2.0 is an open-source industry initiative, spearheaded by The Trade Desk, that aims to replace third-party cookies with hashed and encrypted email-based IDs.

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To red the remainder of this article please visit AdExchanger.com.

MONTREAL, Sept. 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Optable, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) data collaboration platform and clean room solution designed for the advertising ecosystem, has announced a partnership with The Trade Desk, the world's leading independent demand-side advertising platform (DSP), to encrypt and sync Unified ID 2.0 (UID 2.0). Pioneered by The Trade Desk, UID 2.0 is a new industry-wide approach to identity for the open internet that encourages the use of hashed and salted data to maintain the value exchange of the internet, while aiming to upgrade consumer privacy.

As part of the announcement, Optable will become a private operator of UID 2.0.

Through this integration, brands can now easily activate their first-party data, directly from the Optable clean room, in a privacy-conscious and secure environment, for improved precision and performance from their media campaigns.

"The partnership between Optable and The Trade Desk will make it easier for brands and publishers to collaborate and leverage audience data through Unified ID 2.0 to inform media buys," said Vlad Stesin, Chief Strategy Officer and Co-founder, Optable. "We look forward to facilitating collaboration across platforms – from running overlap analysis via clean rooms to activating audiences in The Trade Desk – to greatly improve advertisers' ability to plan and run campaigns."

The partnership will also benefit publishers by simplifying the deployment of UID 2.0 across their websites and applications, and will enable them to use Optable's unique end-to-end clean room approach to keep first-party data in a secure, privacy-safe environment while enabling audience activation using UID 2.0.

"The availability of Unified ID 2.0 on Optable represents improved security and transparency for both advertisers and publishers to deliver relevant advertising," said Jay Goebel, General Manager of Data Partnerships, The Trade Desk. "We welcome Optable to the growing stable of companies who want to build a better advertising experience for consumers, while preserving the value exchange of the open internet."

The partnership marks the latest milestone in Optable's mission to securely connect the world's audience data. By partnering with The Trade Desk and enabling UID 2.0, Optable is one step closer to facilitating frictionless collaboration and increasing accessibility to data clean rooms for both publishers and brands.

About Optable

Optable is a data collaboration and clean room solution designed for the advertising ecosystem in the age of privacy. The product was inspired by the radical transformation in how audience data is governed, connected, and activated. Optable takes an end-to-end approach to data collaboration and is integrated with ad delivery platforms for secure activation, making it possible to deploy campaigns directly from a clean room. It is the only clean room solution that offers frictionless collaboration and interoperability enabling customers to safely and securely match audience data with any partner. For more information, please visit: https://optable.co/

About The Trade Desk

The Trade Desk™ is a technology company that empowers buyers of advertising. Through its self-service, cloud-based platform, ad buyers can create, manage, and optimize digital advertising campaigns across ad formats and devices. Integrations with major data, inventory, and publisher partners ensure maximum reach and decisioning capabilities, and enterprise APIs enable custom development on top of the platform. Headquartered in Ventura, CA, The Trade Desk has offices across North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific. To learn more, visit thetradedesk.com or follow us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube.

Media contacts

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Michael Vaughan
813-210-1706
mvaughan@kcsa.com

SOURCE Optable

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The European netID Foundation was established in March 2018 with the goal of creating a European single sign-on solution across all industries and internet services.

With netID Privacy Centre, users can manage their consent for multiple internet services transparently and in compliance with European data protection regulations.

With this announcement, Optable clients which also support netID can now take advantage of the following functionality:

• Include netID as part of their private identity graph within their Optable Data Collaboration Node.
• Open secure, purpose-limited clean rooms which use netID as the match key between partners.
• Activate ad and marketing programs using netID.

This is an exciting announcement for Optable clients and prospects in the region and will enable reach of close to 38 million users in Germany and more than two million in Austria.

“Our mission is to connect the world’s audience data securely,” said Vlad Stesin, Optable’s Chief Strategy Officer and Co-founder.

“As the use of data clean rooms ramps up across the ecosystem, establishing the principle of easy-to-use online platforms on which companies can safely connect data without violating user privacy, the principles of interoperability and frictionless collaboration remain embedded within our product.”

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The Inuit have 50 words for ‘snow’, taking in all the many and varied characteristics of the white stuff that most of us don’t tend to think about. The ad tech industry, meanwhile, has 50 definitions of a data clean room, but essentially only one name for all of them.

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