Why bring data to SaaS applications when you can bring the applications to your data?
That’s what modern data platforms do, says Erin Foxworthy, global industry go-to-market lead for marketers and advertisers at Snowflake, on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks.
This process is known as “data gravity,” a term Snowflake coined to describe what happens after a company organizes and unifies its data in one place. Not unlike a planet with gravitational pull, the data starts to attract related applications and services.
“These applications are coming to you to do jobs that will help you in downstream marketing activities,” says Foxworthy, who spent seven years at Horizon Media before joining Snowflake in 2022.
The native applications that live within Snowflake are a good example of data gravity in action.
Take identity resolution, for instance. “Identity resolution can now come to your data, look at your first-party data and resolve it,” Foxworthy says. “It can bring household information, maybe clean it with hygiene – those applications make it easy without moving the data.”
Cloud-based platforms, meanwhile, are becoming the foundation for technologies that are increasingly integral to how digital advertising functions, including data clean rooms, first-party data enrichment and native integrations with conversion APIs.
Which is a big reason why Snowflake has been investing in ad tech, media and mar tech over the past few years.
“It’s natural for us to start to see this ecosystem of data providers through our marketplace,” Foxworthy says. “That ecosystem needs to come to the first-party data, because that’s the fuel of the industry.”
Also in this episode: What’s driving the long overdue convergence of ad tech and mar tech, advice for marketers implementing AI into their tech stack and how to select the “right” LLM. (It depends on what you’re trying to achieve.)
For more articles featuring Erin Foxworthy, click here.
