One mark of a maturing tech category is that industry-specialist vendors emerge. Right on cue, we have news from Optable, a data clean room specializing in advertising applications. They just raised a $20 million Series A, bringing total funding to $23 million.
Data clean room vendor Habu has added a native integration with Google Cloud BigQuery, making it easier for companies share data without revealing sensitive information. Habu and BigQuery already have lots of other integrations, so this isn’t all that exciting. But it does illustrate the continued growth of clean rooms and of customer data-related options in BigQuery.
Disney Advertising announced its own data clean room last October and added new features last month. You can reasonably assume it’s powering their new deal with Kroger’s retail media network, which will let advertisers use Kroger data to target Disney streaming TV audiences on Hulu and to measure advertising results.
Procrastinators of the world can throw a party whenever they get around to it: Google has once more pushed back complete third-party cookie deprecation. The new target is “early next year.” Reasons for the delay include concerns expressed by U.K. data regulator Information Commissioner’s Office, an ongoing inquiry by the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority, and widespread discontent in the advertising ecosystem.