The Unified ID 2.0 (UID2), the programmatic industry’s open web advertising identifier, has steadily added to its partnership roster of brands, agencies, ad tech vendors and publishers in the past couple years, becoming the most-used ID aside from walled garden platforms like Google, Facebook and Amazon.
But UID2’s newest addition is perhaps its most interesting and ambitious yet – the cloud data service Snowflake.
Typically, Snowflake operates on top of the company’s cloud infrastructure, namely Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure or the Google Cloud Platform (GCP), to layer in services or manage data across multiple cloud platforms.
Because Snowflake is a hub for many companies’ customer and identity data graphs, it’s in a position to match and recombine different first-party data sets, which could now be translated directly to UID2 IDs.
The walled gardens are doing the same thing: Google, for instance, built Ads Data Hub, the analytics and ad server data hub. And Ads Data Hub is actually part of GCP, not Google’s ad tech business. AWS is likewise building out marketing and ad tech data services within its cloud platform.
But those two cloud services tend to focus exclusively on data within their own platforms, and are tied to media and audience data owned by Google or Amazon, which means the data can’t be extracted or used for enrichment, said Bill Stratton, global head of Snowflake’s media, advertising and technology vertical.
For companies that use Snowflake on top of their cloud infrastructure, Stratton said the integration opens up direct data onboarding and matching opportunities. Disney and NBCUniversal, two Snowflake customers, could analyze their first-party data alongside an advertiser’s first-party data without the restrictions that would be involved using Google Ads Data Hub or Amazon RedShift (AWS’s competitive product to Snowflake), Stratton said. Those clients could attribute campaigns or package audiences using the UID2.
“We’re not selling identity, selling data or taking a CPM. We don’t buy or sell media, obviously. So we can start to decouple the supply chain a little bit for people,” he said.
And Snowflake is already an important vendor within programmatic. The Trade Desk is a Snowflake client. Earlier this year, NBCUniversal launched its own data clean room service with the measurement company VideoAmp, and Snowflake as the technology provider. Last year, the DSP Beeswax, since acquired by Comcast’s Freewheel, also launched a clean room service that only worked for joint Snowflake customers.
Media and advertising is actually the biggest vertical for Snowflake, Stratton said, fueled by the massive data consumption by the category, not necessarily by the number of clients.
The UID2 product doesn’t use a “honeypot” of centralized data, like other advertising ID consortiums, said Bill Michels, The Trade Desk’s GM of product. That means Snowflake is a valuable partner, because it opens up access to data where that raw data is actually housed by many advertisers and publishers – with their cloud vendor.
“Whether you’re a brand, a publisher, a data provider, an identity graph provider or any company that houses data and does analytics, there’s a good chance they use Snowflake’s product,” Michels said. “The data is sitting there, so let’s make it dead simple to adorn it with UID2s.”
