Joining forces has its perks; Hearst Venture’s new partnership with Optable.
With third-party cookies going away, mobile IDs in a state of flux, and the ecosystem constantly shifting we need innovative solutions to help publishers and advertisers securely collect, compare, and leverage audience data. Without new solutions it is darn near impossible to plan, activate, and measure campaigns.
Recently, data collaboration platform and clean room solution, Optable closed a $20M Series A financing deal to beef up their global expansion and support a rapidly growing client base. Among the Series investors is Hearst, who has entered into a commercial agreement with Optable to amplify the value of the publisher’s first-party data and enable interoperability with other data clean room solutions.
We tapped in with Hearst and Optable for their perspective on this new deal and to learn what it really means.
Darcy Frisch, Managing Director and VP, Hearst Ventures 
Yakira Young: Can you tell us about your new partnership with Optable and how it aligns with your overall strategy for data collaboration and privacy?
DF: As an investor, Hearst Ventures is broadly interested in how companies are managing data privacy and governance. We invest in companies that are thinking ahead about how consumer and other data can be managed and deployed responsibly. In the case of Optable, we believe that their solution allows advertisers and publishers alike to effectively use data to collaborate and maintain consumer privacy.
YY: In what ways does Optable’s approach to data collaboration align with evolving consumer attitudes toward data privacy, and how do you see this trend impacting the advertising industry more broadly?
DF: We see Optable’s approach as largely driven by these changes in consumer behavior. It’s clear that audiences demand more control over their own data, requiring both media companies and their advertising partners to respect this sentiment.
Ultimately, this isn’t just about technology, at the core of Hearst’s publisher value proposition is our emphasis on delivering high-quality content to our audiences. Data collaboration technologies simply offer a safer, more controlled way to align consumer demands with advertiser requirements.
Vlad Stesin, Optable Co-Founder and CPO 
YY: How can publishers and advertisers use Optable to better understand their audiences and deliver more effective, targeted advertising campaigns that respect consumer privacy?
VS: Optable’s platform enables publishers to enhance and scale our data-driven collaboration that they offer to advertising partners. This means that they can provide advertisers an “easy button” for leveraging first-party data in a privacy-safe environment, enabling them to build comprehensive media executions, provide seamless activation of targeted audiences across publisher properties and offer enhanced measurement that is rooted in first-party data.
The data clean room approach helps publishers understand exactly which audiences their advertising partners are trying to reach, build better media approaches, deliver better marketing results, and ultimately create better experiences for their audiences.
YY: How does Optable’s approach to data collaboration differ from other solutions in the market, and what benefits does it offer publishers and advertisers?
VS: Optable is laser-focused on the media and advertising industry which creates an emphasis on frictionless collaboration, offering partners a variety of ways to connect customer data. The platform offers an easy-to-use interface ranging from advanced analytics to easy activation of campaigns, at scale, directly from the clean room environment.
We apply industry-leading privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) as well as advanced data security measures to ensure that the usage of data between publishers and their partners is both secure and protected. Our unique approach to privacy balanced with interoperability-by-design allows publishers to scale this solution while assuring that data is never leaked or misused during the collaboration process – a notion the industry is feverishly trying to understand and implement.
All this results in more “clean room media” being transacted by our customers, offering advertisers performant campaign executions rooted in real data.