Snowflake launched a Media Data Cloud in 2021 and began signing deals with CMOs beyond its traditional dealings with CTOs and head of IT types.
Two years on, Snowflake is “becoming infrastructure for businesses developing data-driven marketing applications,” CMO Denise Persson told AdExchanger.
Snowflake continued to flex its marketing and ad tech muscle on Wednesday with the release of its second annual Modern Marketing Data Stack report, which highlights businesses that use Snowflake’s platform. The report is also a chance to boost vendors that bring their business to Snowflake.
Snowflake buckets its martech and ad tech partners into eight groups: Analytics & Data Capture, Enrichment, Identity & Activation, Measurement & Attribution, Integration & Modeling, Business Intelligence, Privacy Enhancing Technologies and AI & Machine Learning.
The company tags a handful of vendors in each category as “Leaders” or “Ones to Watch.”
In Measurement & Attribution, for instance, the leaders are Comscore, DoubleVerify, IQVIA, NCSolutions, Nielsen, Rockerbox and VideoAmp, while EDO and AdImpact are ones to watch.
These classifications were distilled from hundreds of measurement vendors on Snowflake, according to Persson, and based on how many new accounts vendors have added to Snowflake’s platform in the past year. For instance, how many additional Nielsen clients are logging in and using Nielsen services natively on Snowflake.
The “Ones to Watch” designation, meanwhile, is a kudos to startups that may not be onboarding dozens of new clients to Snowflake, but are committed to development on the platform.
Companies that fit that mold include customer data platform ActionIQ, the Unified ID program backed by The Trade Desk (both in the Identity & Activation category) and the single sign-on service provider lockr (in the Privacy Enhancing Technologies category).
The timing of this report is an undisguised dig at a rival. Snowflake’s now-annual marketing and data roadshow counter programs the Salesforce Dreamforce conference in San Francisco.
But Snowflake is also issuing an assurance to its close partners that it won’t hound them out of existence by releasing competing products.
“We’re not going to go out and build applications for marketing,” Persson said.
But Snowflake’s partner-first approach is an important potential differentiator from Amazon Web Services, the 400-pound gorilla among cloud infrastructure services. In July, for example, AWS introduced Identity Resolution, an off-the-shelf ID-matching product that commoditizes other CDP and ID resolution startups.
And, of course, we can’t forget about the AI hype train.
Snowflake is getting on board as marketers lean more on machine learning and AI, said Persson, who noted that as a B2B marketer herself she sees companies using AI every day.
“AI is top of mind for everyone right now,” she said, “but there’s no way you can jump all the way to AI without having the data in order.”
