Data for sale? Take it to the cloud.
That’s the new approach with a partnership between Snowflake, The Trade Desk (TTD) and data marketplace tech vendor Narrative, which announced a new joint product to make it feasible for practically any company with data stored on Snowflake to make that data available in TTD’s marketplace.
Third-party data sales used to occur on the major ad platforms – Google and Facebook, primarily, though TTD also had a large marketplace. But as privacy concerns squeezed third-party data out of those places, it’s been harder for businesses to monetize their data for ads without creating their own walled garden platform, because sharing the data between vendors brings privacy risks.
“Sometimes that happens in clean rooms, sometimes through a secure data share,” David Wells, Snowflake’s industry principal for media and advertising, told AdExchanger. “This is yet another iteration connecting someone who wants to consume data and someone who wants to provide that data.”
How does it work?
The tech itself isn’t a huge lift for Narrative or TTD.
“I don’t know that there’s anything revolutionary about copying data from one point to another point,” said Narrative CEO Tim Mahlman.
But often the companies that place data on the marketplace will be publishers, agencies and other data owners that aren’t accustomed to selling their data in programmatic.
“They don’t think of themselves as a data provider,” he said. “They think of themselves as whatever the company is and happen to have data they might be monetizing.”
Snowflake gets paid as its customers upload more data and query that data more often, thus consuming more compute power. Narrative wins because any data provider that wants to list on Snowflake to sell on TTD must then sign up for its service. And TTD wins because it gets access to the data.
Another benefit for TTD is that neither Snowflake nor Narrative takes a cut of the CPM. That means the fees to Snowflake and Narrative fall under different line items – Narrative, a subscription license, Snowflake for data consumption – so those payments wouldn’t decrease campaign ROAS, like when data is sold as a CPM.
A company with its data already stored in Snowflake through this partnership could have that data turned into UID2 IDs and then transacted on TTD. Although, Mahlman said that sometimes companies aren’t selling the data, instead listing it so it’s available for their own ad measurement and targeting purposes.
But selling data is the name of the game. As long as companies aren’t “cannibalizing their core offerings” by listing data, Wells said, it’s an easy way to turn that data sitting in a warehouse into revenue.
The early partners include online seller and speedy delivery service GoPuff, audience data company Deep Sync and location data company Intuizi, a mix of first- and third-party data sellers.
GoPuff has its own customers and payment info and also operates its own retail media network, while Deep Sync and Intuizi package and resell data.
What’s next?
Wells said Snowflake intends to expand the same data sales and enrichment model to other data vendors and DSPs or SSPs. First, though, he said the company will prove out the model with TTD and Narrative.
“With ad tech, we go deep at the outset as opposed to wide,” he said. In other words, they will commit heavily to this one partnership rather than create an open program practically any mar tech business can plug into and use.
The data sales are also currently only in the US, where there is much more data and fewer regulations on the use of data for advertising.
“We have grand designs in mind with this collaboration,” Wells said. And the company does hope to expand globally when the stakeholders are comfortable with the differing privacy standards.
Narrative, too, can reproduce the same tech with other clouds and DSPs, Mahlman said. In fact, the idea got started a few months ago when Narrative and Snowflake were discussing he difficulty some businesses were having translating their raw data in Snowflake to TTD to use as UID2 IDs.
It would be hard to reproduce elsewhere, though, he said, because the other main cloud platforms and ad-buying platforms are already consolidated walled gardens. Which is to say, Google and Amazon.
“There is only one Snowflake and one Trade Desk,” Mahlman said.
