Roughly a year ago, Snowflake launched its Media Data Cloud, a suite of solutions built specifically to serve businesses with media and advertising needs.
Fast-forward 11 months, and Snowflake is spiking the football with a Data Cloud “world tour” making 21 stops in cities around the world to tout its offering. The tour kicked off in New York City on Wednesday.
The company also published the first of what will become an annual report called “The Modern Marketing Data Stack,” which aggregates how Snowflake customers use cloud and marketing technology vendors.
Snowflake is releasing this inaugural report now because it’s got enough data to draw conclusions. There’s been an increase in adoption of Snowflake’s tech by companies in the marketing space over the past couple of years, Snowflake CMO Denise Persson told AdExchanger.
The report is based on an analysis of 6,000 Snowflake Media Data Cloud customers and how they use the platform. (In content marketing, sharing research methodology can be an opportunity to humblebrag.)
Snowflake also examined how 500 of its brand customers that are listed in the 2022 Forbes Global 2,000 ranking (another humblebrag) use Snowflake’s platform to work with tech partners. More than 95% use at least one of the tech or data companies listed in Snowflake’s data stack report, and seven in 10 use three or more vendors.
“There’s a massive need for education among marketers,” Persson said.
She added that 20 or even 15 years ago, marketing automation tech and DMPs were only first starting to penetrate the market, and competency was a scarce resource. (Persson would know personally, considering her track record as a B2B CMO at Apigee, the API-maker acquired by Google in 2016, and at cloud data company Genesys before that.) A similar dynamic is at play now with cloud-based marketing tech.
The report segments Snowflake’s vendor ecosystem, which now includes more than 7,000 tech and data companies, into six main categories that marketers should be aware of: analytics, integration and modeling, identity and enrichment, activation and measurement, business intelligence and Data Science and AI.
Persson said that another catalyst for publishing the report came when Snowflake determined that the most sophisticated marketers and data-driven businesses tend to use third-party tech for these six use cases. (It’s worth noting that not all marketers use third-party partners, though. Some clients have tried or are trying to build solutions themselves.)
But Snowflake is trying to grease the funnel a bit so that marketers looking for partners test those vendors on its platform.
Not unlike a Forrester wave, Snowflake’s six vendor categories each have five “leaders” and vendors listed as “ones to watch,” a catch-all bucket for companies with momentum but less adoption or tech that’s designed for specific use cases.
The measurement and activation category, for instance, pegs Braze, HubSpot, The Trade Desk, VideoAmp and Simon Data as leaders. Zeta, Rivery and Hightouch are classified as ones to watch.
The only exception is the identity data provider category, which lists eight vendors with Snowflake integrations: Acxiom, Aidentified, Experian, FullContact, Verisk (via its acquisition this year of Infutor), LiveRamp, Merkle and Neustar. (They’re listed equally and not split into leaders versus ones to watch.)
The idea isn’t that businesses need a vendor for each use case listed in Snowflake’s report, Persson said.
For example, Snowflake client TripAdvisor works with Simon Data (a leader in the measurement and activation category) and Tableau (a leader in the business intelligence segment). Another brand, cosmetics company Glossier, uses Stripe, Fivetran and dbt to connect its physical supply chain to marketing data and sales forecasting.
It took years, perhaps even a couple of decades, for marketers to develop solid business practices and competencies for web analytics, programmatic advertising and cloud data extraction.
And now marketers have a lot to learn again, Persson said.
When it comes to how first-party data and privacy technology will upend data-driven marketing, she said, they’re “back on the maturation curve and at the start.”
