Everyone’s got their head in the clouds: ad tech, media and even consumer data brokers.
On Tuesday, Acxiom announced a data clean room service built on Snowflake that media and advertising companies can use to target and measure campaigns using their own first-party data sets and Acxiom’s consumer profiles.
Data clean room services have existed for as long as a decade, Acxiom CEO Chad Engelgau told AdExchanger. Acxiom even used to have its own in the form of Safe Haven, which left with LiveRamp after the spinoff in 2018.
The clean room trend is often thought of as a walled garden platform phenomenon, Engelgau said. But there is a role for agencies and data providers to play – and IPG-owned Acxiom is a bit of both – although their potential has been underappreciated by the ad industry, he said.
Advertisers have been known to embrace some new tech layer (be it a CDP, DMP, data clean room or what have you) but without “the services that are wrapped around them,” Engelgau said. Ignoring the service layer usually means buyers don’t get much value from the solution.
Third-party value prop
The biggest walled gardens – Google, Amazon and Meta – have the mindshare and generate most of the revenue in the clean room category right now. But that’s changing.
More than 20 of Acxiom’s media company partners have their own data clean room product, Engelgau said, including Roku, Twitter and Snap.
The role of a neutral third-party in this cloud-based advertising system is to evaluate providers as standalone channels, he said. The Roku clean room, for example, doesn’t report user-level data or break out channel mix by campaign. But advertisers can attribute Roku as one channel within a mix of other media platforms.
Many advertisers, such as auto brands, retailers, restaurant chains, credit card providers, financial institutions and healthcare companies, own their conversion data, Engelgau said. But even CPG marketers that don’t have their own conversion data can get value from partnering with data clean rooms.
Traditionally, advertisers, media sellers and/or retailers would each send their first-party data to Acxiom. The overlapped audience could be used for targeting, lookalikes or to match to conversions from the campaign – but the value isn’t necessarily translatable to other campaigns.
In a cloud-based system, a brand and retailer working together might create an overlapping audience that can grow and be used for other purposes over time.
“They’re buying the marketing collaboration outcomes created from [the clean room],” Engelgau said, which goes beyond the pure software subscription.
Snowflake’s role
But where does Snowflake come into it?
Snowflake has established itself over the past few years as “the cross-cloud cloud technology,” according to Engelgau. Businesses with cloud systems rather than their own servers and IT are primarily on AWS, Microsoft Azure and/or the Google Cloud Platform.
But Snowflake isn’t another cloud infrastructure. Rather, it’s a layer that can sit atop multiple clouds. (Many companies work with multiple cloud providers, since they all have occasional service blackouts and unique applications).
“We’ve seen a tremendous opportunity to build off of Snowflake’s value proposition,” Engelgau said.
Acxiom is building on Snowflake, rather than on AWS or Google Cloud, because Snowflake is a strategically aligned partnered.
Snowflake is a known commodity with big brands and media, including financial and healthcare companies that assiduously vet vendors. Privacy and security compliance can be a real lag when, say, a travel company and a credit card service are trying to collaborate on a marketing promotion with a data clean room startup.
Using Snowflake “expedites how quickly we can come to audience development, analytics and, of course, campaign execution,” Engelgau said.
It’s also helpful that Snowflake isn’t a media owner or an agency services provider, whereas other clean room tech vendors are.
“We don’t own data,” said Bill Stratton, head of Snowflake’s media, entertainment and advertising vertical. “We don’t sell advertising and we’re not in the measurement business.”
Snowflake doesn’t need to do the identity resolution or profile enrichment in order to serve its purpose for the Acxiom clean room service or for other industry solutions, Stratton said. Rather, it can serve as a bridge for companies that want to partner and collaborate “without having to copy or move their data,” he said.
And when it comes to third-party data and human services, Snowflake is willing, even eager, to hand that business off to partners, said Engelgau, who noted that Snowflake realizes its cloud platform isn’t a complete solution without a services layer.
“They’re helping brands understand that there is no magic wand at the technology layer,” he said.
